RFC-71
by Darius Kazemi, March 12 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.
Enter the CCN
RFC-71 is titled “Reallocation in Case of Input Error” by Tjaart Schipper of UCLA's Campus Computing Network. It's dated September 25th, 1970.
The technical content
This is a brief note outlining a procedure for how the UCLA CCN will handle memory allocation if there's an error in the received message such that it can't tell how long the message is. The receiving computer will tell the sender, “There was an error and I was unable to allocate memory because I have no idea how long your message is. I'm disregarding everything until you have sent me a new message and we try again.”
Analysis
This seems to be a notice that the CCN will be unilaterally doing this, rather than a suggestion or a specification.
Further reading
I could not find much further information on Schipper. By August 1972, he is no longer listed as a CCN liaison to the ARPANET project, and later RFCs list him as living in the Netherlands.
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 a Mozilla Fellow and I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with both ActivityPub and the Dat Project.