RFC-331
by Darius Kazemi, November 27 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.
Distant hosts
RFC-331 is titled “IMP System Change Notification”. It's authored by John M. McQuillan of BBN and dated April 19, 1972.
The technical content
BBN is announcing with this RFC that there will be a gradual network rollout of new Interface Messaging Processor software across the network. Every IMP site will be mailed a tape with the new software on it, and asks that on May 15, IMP site operators upgrade the software.
The big changes are more network statistics gathering and also the inclusion of the Very Distant Host option. As described in RFC-263, this option lets you enable more error checking for a given connection, which in turn lets you connect a machine to the IMP with a cable of length more than about 2,000 feet.
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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.