RFC-52

by Darius Kazemi, Feb 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.

More universities

RFC-52 is titled “Updated Distribution List”, and is authored by Jon Postel and Steve Crocker of UCLA. The date is July 1st, 1970, though I think that is wrong (see below).

The technical content

This adds the following institutions to the RFC distribution list:

Analysis

Several individuals are shuffled around and the contact of some of the computer scientists and engineers is replaced with the contact of their administrative assistants. I think this indicates that their hands were very full with this and other projects.

If you've been paying attention to the dates, there was a flurry of RFCs in March and April, and one single RFC in May! I think this is due to maybe burnout or just everyone going into heads-down working mode after the Spring Joint Computer Conference at the beginning of May.

The RFC is dated July 1st 1970 but I think its true date is June 1st 1970. My main reason is the next half dozen RFCs are from June, and that I've spotted errors like this with dates elsewhere in the early RFC series.

Further reading

Here is a history of the MERIT network (PDF), provided by the institution itself.

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About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm a Mozilla Fellow and I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with both ActivityPub and the Dat Project.