RFC-335

by Darius Kazemi, December 1 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.

Upgrading the rat's nest

RFC-335 is titled “New Interface – IMP/360”. It's authored by Roland F. Bryan of the UCSB Computer Research Lab and dated May 1, 1972.

The technical content

A new interface between the IBM 360/75 and their local IMP has been installed. It is more “production-ready” than their previous interfaces and they would like to hear if anyone encounters issues connecting to UCSB services now that it's installed.

Analysis

The early physical wiring connections between Host computers and their IMPs were all more or less hacked together and were highly specific to their individual site installation. Recall that since there is no computer networking to speak of at this time,and basically no hardware standardization between computers made by different vendors. So it's not like you can go to the store and buy commercial cables!

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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.