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Happy 35th birthday, RFC 1!
An anonymous reader writes "On April 7th, 1969, the first ever RFC was published, describing the networking technology behind the then-nascent ARPAnet. In the intervening 35 years, networking technology has come a long way, but it brings perspective to the modern Internet to reflect on how it all began."
If you're talking about the hardware, then the first networks were the telegraph networks followed by the telephone networks. The thing is, the telephone networks that still carry the majority of Internet traffic haven't changed since Alexander Graham Bell. In fact, if he were reanimated and shown a wall jack he'd recognize it and the telephone connected to it. Neither have changed much since he invented them. If you're talking about protocols and computer networking then I guess we've come along way since 1969. I suppose.
It seems odd to me that Un*x time starts 1/1/70, but the opperating system was in development before that date. Which raises the question, what did they use for a base before 1970?
The RFC includes an itneresting statment about 'user input from keyboard, Lincoln Wand, etc.'. It appears that a Lincoln Wand is what we now call a stylus...
http://www.packet.cc/files/lincoln-wand.html
Your monitor is staring at you.
It's never too late, but your comments may not draw much serious attention.
I'm curious which model of Teletype they were using, back in 1969. My father still has a few Model 14 and I first used 33's on a visit to a corporate sponsor of my Explorer Post. I always did like the font from the Model 43, I used to run off most of my library copies of code on them for the easy to read font.
Ah the smell of printer ribbon ink in the spring...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
isn't that why some older OS treat time() as signed int ?
The Connected Internet was operated by committee of the users. engineering details were worked out through the mechanism of issuance of RFCs (request for comment) and comments thereto for the filer and /or committee. the IETF (internet engineering task force) was the body that governed the RFC process, and it just sorta grew out of some chats by the detail wizards working on the Arpanet at the time.
what we have now is not necessarily The Connected Internet as it was known and loved in the 80s and early 90s. but it should remain as such, controlled by the users, not a bunch of pinheaded goddamned government know-nothings pushing alternate agendas.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I noticed that 5 bits are reserved for the destination.
Does that mean they were limited to the astronomical number of 32 hosts on the ARPANet?
-Mark
How about this one:
RFC 799 - Internet name domains (September 1981)
"In the long run, it will not be practicable for every internet
host to include all internet hosts in its name-address tables."
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Heh..this type of thing is actually pretty true. I remember when we first got cable tv (little redneck town at the top of a mountain). The 'information channel' (you know, the one that now uses windoze, likely used amiga in the past to show communitity bulletins and weather and such) was a camera inside of a cylinder. Within the cylinder, they had mounted a thermometer, barometer, and community notices in large type on paper. The camera would slowly revolve to show everything. Didn't really seem weird back then, but kind of funny now in retrospect (seeing as computers WERE around back then and I believe they were being used for those channels...guess they were still to expensive or the local cable co was just not that informed).
An important one.
IMHO, probably one of the most important and most well-known is RFC 822.
Even though HTTP is used even more than SMTP these days it wasn't always so. I kept hearing no end of RFC 822, the Dcc field, etc. in the old days.
From a history of the Internet perspective I have to wonder when it was that port 80 traffic overtook port 25.
"Provided by the management for your protection."