RFC-95
by Darius Kazemi, April 5 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.
Paper
RFC-95 is titled “Distribution of NWG/RFCs Through the NIC”, authored by Steve Crocker on February 4th, 1971.
The technical content
Something that comes up every time I talk to people about this blog is: these RFCs are paper documents sent via the postal service. It's a mailing list, but at this point in time email had not been invented. So all of this was coordinated by secretaries at the various sites maintaining manual distribution lists.
This document notifies people in the Network Working Group that the Network Information Center (NIC) at Stanford Research Institute is going to be taking on a more authoritative role in managing offline communication between ARPANET sites.
This document makes a request that individual ARPANET sites should have a Technical Liaison Contact, who is the main person receiving the physical copies of RFCs. It's their job to notify the right people at their institution of the RFC content, so if something comes in about graphics, the liaison is supposed to notify their local graphics expert.
RFCs will only be sent to these liaisons.
RFC numbers are now being assigned by Jeanne North (aka Reddy Dively). NIC numbers (which is a separate numbering system used by SRI/NIC) are also currently being assigned by her.
If a person at an ARPANET site wishes to distribute an RFC, they can either send a document to North at the NIC, or send it themselves to everyone provided they let North know and get an updated mailing list membership from her.
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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.