From: v - Mark Kuharich (mkuharich@punchnetworks.com)
Date: Mon May 01 2000 - 16:27:32 PDT
from transhumantech:
From: Bob Braden <braden@ISI.EDU>
Thanks to (what in retrospect turns out to be) collossal mismanagement by US
military research funders, the online copies of most of the early RFCs were
lost at some point. Several years ago, Jon Postel initiated a project
called "RFCs online" to make these early RFCs available online again. A
number of dedicated volunteers have taken paper copies and scanned/tyuped
them in again. This project is still continuing, and we add a few every
week. There are some 200 left to do.
Last week I proof-read the new version of the following RFC:
Cerf, V., Dalal, Y., and C. Sunshine, "Specification of
Internet Transmission Control Program", RFC 675, Dec 1974,
and it is now online at the RFC Editor Web site. The easiest way to get it
is the URL:
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc675.txt
I have not checked carefully, but I believe this may be the first complete
specification of TCP. It is interesting in a number of ways: how mature the
specification was already at this stage, and features that were later
omitted (e.g., letters). This document describes both the protocol (rather
cursorily) and an implementation (in great and astonishing detail, with many
flow charts). Note that this was before the TCP/IP split, so the TCP header
includes local and remote IP addresses.
Finally, I want to tip my hat to Alex McKenzie, who was the volunteer
responsible for most of the work on putting this RFC online. You should
know that the original had some twenty full-page hand-drawn flowcharts. In
what could only have been a labor of love, Alex turned them all into ASCII,
a truly remarkable feat. Since this particular RFC is of great interest for
tracing the development of TCP, I think his effort was well spent, but I
think we should be very grateful to him.
I happened to run into Carl Sunshine yesterday at a UCLA Computer Science
event, and he could not remember who primarily wrote this RFC. It is long
(~70 pages) and detailed, so someone put an AWFUL lot of work into it.
Bob Braden
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 01 2000 - 16:31:06 PDT