RFC-359

by Darius Kazemi, December 25 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.

Continued failure to upgrade

RFC-359 is titled “Status of the Release of the New IMP System (2600)”. It's authored by Dave Walden of BBN and dated June 22, 1972.

The technical content

The new IMP software promised in RFC-343 still has not been successfully deployed! Walden says that on their first try, BBN completely underestimated the difficulty of deploying at 25 sites. On their second try, they deployed but encountered bugs and had to roll it back. On their third try, it worked except for Terminal IMP systems, so they had to roll it back yet agian. On their fourth try, it seemed to work but then mysteriously broke after 24 hours of operation.

They plan to try again soon.

Analysis

This is the most #relatable RFC ever written.

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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.