RFC 128

BYTES ✨

okay bestie, let's get into it 🎀 First, the title block, because it's giving official paperwork 📄

• Network Working Group, Request for Comments: 128, written by J. Postel from UCLA, Computer Science 🦋
• Category: C.2, D.
• NIC #5844, dated 21 April 71
• Obsoletes: none. Updates: none. Nothing replaced, nothing patched, very clean 💅

Now the tea ☕ so the 2nd level protocol now lets you set a Byte size parameter, and ngl it's kinda unclear what to do with it 💀 I can totally picture an implementation where the 3rd level programs never even see this parameter 🙈 Crocker says in RFC 123 that control of this parameter goes to the 3rd level programs, and that both sender and receiver can specify byte size values to the NCP 🌸

There are at least two interpretations if the sender and receiver specify different byte sizes 👀

• I. The first is that the connection is illegal. 🚫
• II. The second is that the NCP must parse the data stream on receipt from the network and into a buffer according to the byte size of the sender, and subsequently parse the data stream on transfer from the buffer to the receiver. In this second case there are two sub cases.
  • A. One is to consider bits as the basic unit.
  • B. The other is to consider bytes as the significant unit and pad (on the right or left?) or truncate to make things fit, or other transformation.

Okay, the bits version (Case II.A.) is the one that's giving main character energy 🦋 Here's the example 👇

For example, if the sender specified byte size = 5 and the receiver specified byte size = 3 then

Receiver                   NCP                    Sender
-+---+---+---+---+      +--------+      +-----+-----+---
 |000|001|010|011| <--- | Buffer | <--- |00000|10100|11
-+---+---+---+---+      +--------+      +-----+-----+---

At UCLA-Computer Science we are contemplating allowing sender and receiver to specify different byte sizes and consider bits as the basic unit (Case II.A.) 🍓 This does not rule out our considering the second subcase (Case II.B.) 🧚 We may allow 3rd level programs to specify a library or user supplied routine to perform the

RFC 128                          Bytes                        April 1971

transformation between sender and receiver bytes. Perhaps these transformation routines would be written in the Data Reconfiguration Language 💜

[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ] [ into the online RFC archives by Duncan de Waal 03/98 ]

and that's the tea, bestie 🌈✨