RFC-304

by Darius Kazemi, October 31 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Data control facility

RFC-304 is titled “A Data Management System Proposal for the ARPA Network”. It's authored by Douglas B. McKay of IBM and dated February 17, 1972.

The technical content

This is a long one, and it's meant to start a conversation about what data management on the network will look like. It's explicitly not supposed to be a complete standard. It's an example of an early straw man proposal, a draft document meant to generate discussions, in part by encouraging people to argue against its flaws.

A Data Control Facility (DCF) is proposed. The concept of a DCF was referenced in McKay and Karp's RFC-146 nine months prior. A DCF is a program that lets a remote user do stuff with data without knowing anything about the file system or operating system of the computer that hosts the DCF. It's an example of an “indirect service” a la Bhushan.

FTP is also discussed, and in particular the idea that DCFs could transfer files via that protocol.

Analysis

I love how the language around things like file transfer hasn't settled yet. For example, the author talks about how a file is to be “shipped” from Santa Barbara to BBN.

I notice that the text version of the RFC, which was transcribed in 1998, has the pages out of order — the last page of the text version belongs in the middle of page 3 of the text version. The PDF-with-images version I've linked above is a scan of the original and is correct. (I've submitted an errata report to the RFC Editor.)

How to follow this blog

You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.