RFC 63

Belated Network Meeting Report ✨

okay bestie, let's get into it 🎀 Network Working Group, Request for Comments #63, written by V. Cerf on 31 July 70. It's giving belated because the meeting happened way earlier. The original doesn't list a category, and it doesn't obsolete or update anything. 🦋

On 8 May 1970, the NWG hosted a meeting at Lincoln Labs. Three topics were on the agenda 💅

• Lincoln Lab's Local Interaction Language (LIL)
• Records, Messages, and Format in HOST-HOST information exchange
• Miscellaneous gripes 🙈

The first topic is fully covered in Lincoln Lab's Semi annual Technical Summary titled "Graphics", dated May 31, 1970 (document id. ESD-TR-70-151). Go read it if you want the deep dive 📚

Records and Messages 🍓

The second topic had a lot of talk about NWG/RFC #42. The proposal was that every message starts with an 8-bit type byte, and that byte declares the format of the message that follows. Lowkey iconic idea 👑

The group landed on these decisions:

• Records can start anywhere inside a message. 🧚
• The first 8 bits of a record are reserved for type information. 💜
• The first transmission on a connection starts a record. 🌸

Type 0 means the transmission that follows is an arbitrarily long record, and there won't be any more type bytes after it. 🌈

Messages and records are separate from flow control. So getting a message doesn't mean anything semantically, but getting a record might kick off some interpretation process. ✨

After discussion, the NWG/RFC #42 proposals got reshuffled into this list 🦋

type 0 = bit string of arbitrary length follows

type 1 = 8-bit ASCII follows

type 2 = EBCDIC follows

type 3 = MOD 33 TTY 7-bit ASCII

type 4 = YOUR Local
         followed by another type byte

type 5 = MY Local
         followed by another type byte

Who's Responsible 💖

The praise or blame for all of this goes to the people who showed up. Here's the squad 🫶

E. Ancona (LL)
T. J. Barkalow (LL)
D. B. Black (Harvard)
Jack Bouknight (UI)
Howard Brodie (MAC)
Vint Cerf (UCLA)
Steve Crocker (UCLA)
Jim Curry (UTAH)
A. Evans (LL, MAC)
Robert Flegal (UTAH)
Jim Frogie (LL)
J. D. Fry (MITRE)
John Heafner (RAND)
Bob Hoffman (RAND)
Richard Kalin (LL)
William Kantrowitz (LL)
Peggy Karp (MITRE)
Abe Landsberg (SDC)
Robert Long (SDC)
James Madden (UI)
John Melvin (SRI)
Alan Nemeth (LL)
John Newkirk (Harvard)
Jon Postel (UCLA)
Tom O'Sullivan (Raytheon)
Ari Shoshani (SDC)
Joel Winett (LL)

One last tea ☕: NWG/RFCs won't be going to Chuck Rose at Case University anymore. Jim Torson is taking over receiving them. 😭

Archive note: this RFC was put into machine readable form for entry into the online RFC archives by Tammy and Ofer Porat 1/97. 🌟