RFC 446

Proposal to consider a Network Program Resource Notebook ✨

Network Working Group 🎀 Written by L. Peter Deutsch at SRI, dated January 25, 1973. This is RFC 446 (NIC #14068). The document doesn't say what category or status it has, and it doesn't mention anything it obsoletes or updates. 🦋

Okay so, the recent requests from Jean Iseli of MITRE were asking about every resource of type X on the network, where X means macro processors, data management systems, and electromagnetic wave analysis programs 🧚. That got the author thinking, and the suggestion is that the NIC should be the place where all the replies get stored 💖.

Sharing knowledge and techniques (not to mention programs) is literally a central reason the ARPANET exists 🔥. So it makes total sense to start organizing that process now, since someone (MITRE, plus the government agencies it's acting for) has decided there's enough info to be worth collecting 💅.

The network community should get at least as much out of this collection as the outside agencies do, which is only fair 🫶.

The NIC already has catalog and keyword tools for the Journal, plus a big index of computer-related documents that aren't online yet 📚. The author's guess is that extending all that to cover programs and documentation wouldn't be a huge job, and it would probably pay off right away by making research sites more effective ✨.

This doesn't get into the bigger question, though 👀. What does the network community actually owe the outside world, especially government agencies, as a service and information resource? Its presumed main job is learning how to build and use computer networks, and its real main job is doing research in lots of areas of computing that have nothing to do with networks at all 🤓.

The author thinks the network community hasn't really thought hard about two things: the mix-up between the ARPANET as a service network and the ARPANET as a network research experiment, and the frustration and communication breakdowns that happen when network duties get piled onto research projects that already exist 😭.

The author is also worried that the network's unclear status has caused a sharp split between research and maintenance sites on one side and government agency user sites on the other 💀. That could only make the author's bigger concern worse, which is that the research sites are being used for non-research purposes in a way that's been pretty rare in the history of ARPA/IPT 🙈.

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