RFC-84
by Darius Kazemi, March 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.
Reddy Dively
RFC-84 is called “LIST OF NWG/RFC's 1-80”. It's by Jeanne B. North, who was a research analyst at SRI/ARC. It's dated December 23rd, 1970.
The technical content
This is a list of all RFCs from RFC-1 to RFC-80. It's the first published RFC to act as a directory for RFCs.
Further reading
Here are some photos of North from her time as NIC supervisor. She was also known as Reddy Dively at various points in her career, so anyone who wants to search for her should probably look for both names. She was President of the San Francisco chapter of the Special Libraries Association from 1966-67, which would mean that she was one of the many information management professionals recruited to the SRI/ARC NIC. She later worked at the Charles Babbage Institute back when it was still in Palo Alto, before it moved to Minnesota. This paper discusses the impact that these women had on the development of technology in the 20th century, and mentions North/Dively.
Here's a brief bio of her from the paper I link above:
Born Jeanne M. Barto in Independence, Missouri, North earned a certificate in aeronautical engineering from Cornell (1934), a B.A. in English from State University of Iowa (1947), and a B.S. in Library Science from Columbia University (1948) (Marquis, 1958). She worked as a Junior Liaison Engineer for both Curtis-Wright Corporation and Wilson Chemical Feeders before joining United Aircraft Corporation as a librarian (‘‘SLA,’’ 1960). Later, on the West Coast, she worked for Lockheed Missile and Space Company and Stanford University (Foremost, 1970, p. 474). She seems to have legally changed her name to Reddy Dively, perhaps in the 1970s when she was working on ARPANET as a member of Douglas C. Engelbart’s team at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Engelbart was the inventor of the computer mouse, and ARPANET was one of the networks that evolved into the Internet (Bardini, 2000). For a short time, North was supervisor of the National Information Center, which sought to ‘‘facilitate the flow of information between sites on the Network [i.e., ARPANET] and to and from other stations’’ (‘‘Jeanne,’’ n.d.; Watson & North, 1971, p. 1). North and her husband both died on the same day in 2005.
Funny enough, I'll be combing through records at the Charles Babbage Institute in June for this very project. I wonder if I'll touch any documents that Dively/North touched.
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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.