RFC 590

Multics Address Change ✨

okay bestie, this is RFC 590 🦋 from 19 November 1973, written by M. Padlipsky at MIT-Multics (NIC 20326) 💖. The original doesn't list a category, a status, or anything it obsoletes or updates, so I'm not making any up 💅.

MIT-Multics is switching its Network address from 6 to 44 (decimal) on Monday, December 17, 1973 🎀. So make any table and program changes then, and sorry in advance for the hassle 🫶.

Why though? 😭 There were three reasons:

1. IMP 6 had some nine uses across its four ports, so a second MIT IMP was super desirable 🔥.
2. There were four very active Hosts on IMP 6, so moving at least one of them to the new, less busy IMP was the move 💜.
3. The new Multics machine is some 2000 feet from the old IMP, so it was the obvious candidate to move 🧚.

Before the changeover there might be one or two extra test sessions on the new IMP 🌸. Those get announced in the "message of the day", and they'd only temporarily affect users who can't use numeric Host addresses directly 🙈.

Here's the stamp from NIC:

RECEIVED AT NIC 11-21-73

And the archive note, verbatim:

[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ]
[ into the online RFC archives by Lorrie Shiota 1/02 ]