RFC-309
by Darius Kazemi, November 5 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.
Settling file transfer
RFC-309 is titled “Data and File Transfer Workshop Announcement”. It's authored by Abhay Bhushan of MIT and dated March 17th, 1972.
The technical content
This RFC announces a mid-April invite-only workshop on Data and File Transfer. The workshop will be convened with the explicit goal of codifying file transfer on the ARPANET once and and for all, and will consider all kinds of users including terminal IMP users that are normally left out of protocol and service design.
As usual, “participants are encouraged to have written position papers” before the meting.
The workshop features talks from people representing all the major players in file transfer on the network: generic network users, the datacomputer, terminal IMP users, and remote job entry.
Of the twelve items of suggested reading, eleven are previous RFCs. The one non-RFC document is a publication called “Data Language” by Computer Corporation of America, but I can't find something with that exact name online to link. Update: thanks to Retrocomputing Stack Exchange user snips-n-snails for finding this document, a 1971 CCA working paper called “Datalanguage”. Also thanks to reader wizzwizz4 for posting the question.
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.