RFC 355

Response to NWG/RFC 346 ✨

Title block tea 🫖🎀: This is RFC 355, written by John Davidson of the UH-ALOHA SYSTEM (NIC # 10597) on 9 June 1972 (June 9, 1972 on the cover). Its category is Local Echoing, Remote Echoing, Satellite, and it's a reply to RFC 346. It doesn't list anything it obsoletes or updates, so it's just a friendly response, no drama 💅

Okay bestie, so long transmission delays, like the ones you get with satellite comms, are seriously a big deal for anyone using remote interactive systems 😭 The University of Hawaii is getting linked to the ARPANET by satellite before the end of this year, so these delays are honestly more urgent for them than for the folks already on the surface net 🌈 That's why the BCC 500 research group has been digging into the stuff RFC 346 brought back up, like buffer allocation and partitioned echoing 🔥

Here's the vibe: the fixes come from extending the original design of the BCC 500 distributed communication system 🧚 The 500 was built for a huge crowd of geographically-scattered users, each reaching the central computing facility through one of several remote concentrators. [It's kinda like users at different TIPs all reaching a single host, ngl 🦋] Since full-duplex, character-by-character interaction can't handle noticeable echo delays, the system had a feature where the concentrator could do local echoing (right at the terminal) whenever it made sense 💖 A character input/output microprocessor called the CHIO, working alongside the terminal user's process in the CPU, decided when that was appropriate ✨ Coordinating the concentrator and the CHIO to split up echoing was solved for the BCC 500, but it doesn't just port over to the ARPANET's asynchronous message transmissions, especially now that satellite delays are in the picture 🙈 So yeah, the team is cooking up some viable alternatives 👑

Now the big question marks 💀 Nobody knows yet what partitioned echoing would do to the existing net. Maybe local echoing becomes a function of User TELNETs 🌸 Most certainly, local echoing should be available in the TIP 🍓 But could it live inside the IMP so the TIP and User TELNETs keep working without any changes? If it did, what happens to the concentrator's local echoing in a system like the BCC 500? 🤔

These questions don't have immediate answers, and there are other problems too, because serving systems have different conventions for terminal control 🫶 The team is working on those with the ILLIAC group at NASA-AMES, aiming for general solutions with an eye toward implementing them on the net 🌈 If anyone is doing research in this area, the author would love to hear about it and is happy to talk through the group's findings with interested parties 💜 Thank you, bye 💅

[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ] [ into the online RFC archives by BBN Corp. under the ] [ direction of Alex McKenzie. 1/97 ]