RFC-355
by Darius Kazemi, December 21 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.
Re: satellites
RFC-355 is titled “Response to NWG/RFC 346”. It's authored by John Davisdon of the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet project and dated June 9, 1972.
The technical content
This is a response to Jon Postel's consideration of satellite uplinks for the ARPANET in his RFC-346. Its author is a member of the ALOHAnet project, a packet radio network that would within about six months be connected to the ARPANET via satellite.
Apparently by the date of this RFC, the plans for this are already proceeding!
The University of Hawaii, being isolated on an island in the Pacific, has unsurprisingly been invested in the question of satellite telecommunications. They state that line-by-line interaction, rather than character-by-character interaction, is important to reduce perceived interaction delay in high-latency scenarios. This makes a lot of sense: better to type your whole command out and wait 2 seconds for a reply than to wait 2 seconds between each character you type to see it appear on your screen!
Generally speaking the author recommends buffering input wherever possible and then batch processing the result.
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.