RFC 66

3rd Level Ideas and other Noises 🎀

okay so the title block first 💅 This one is from Network Working Group, it's Request for Comments #66, written by S. Crocker at UCLA, dated 26 August 70. The header doesn't list a category, and it doesn't say what it obsoletes or updates, so there's nothing to report there 🙈

On 12 August 70, I met with BBN, plus reps from BBN and MIT, and we talked about third level protocol 🧚

Dial-up ✨

The dial-up protocol below was agreed on at that meeting 🫶

The point of this bit of protocol is to get a process at one site (I'll call it the using site) in touch with the logger at the other site (the serving site) 🦋

To start things off, the using process attaches a receive socket US and asks for a connection to socket 1 on the serving host. So the using NCP sends this over link 1, where US is the user's receive socket, p is the link, and space is some nominal space allocation 💖

               1            4               4                 1
             ---------------------------------------------------
             |RTS |         US     |        1          |      p|
             ---------------------------------------------------
             |ALL |     P    |    space    |
             -------------------------------

The serving host can say no to contact. If it does, it replies with the standard CLS 🙅‍♀️ But if it says yes, it sends exactly an even 32 bit number over the connection and then closes it. That even 32 bit number is the name of a receive socket on the serving host 🌸 This socket, plus the next higher numbered socket, is reserved for contact with the user. So the serving NCP sends this on link 1:

                 1           4          1
               ----------------------------
               | STR |       1        | US|
               ----------------------------

and then this on link p:

                          4
                     -----------
                     |    SS   |
                     -----------

Note that SS must be even 👀

After it sends the server socket number SS, the NCP sends this:

            1          4                     4
           -------------------------------------
           |CLS |         1        |        US |
           -------------------------------------
           |STR |      SS+1        |        US |
           ------------------------------------------
           |RTS |      SS          |      US+1 |  q |
           ------------------------------------------
           |ALL | q |       space      |
           -----------------------------

The using host sets up its side of the connections by sending this:

           1           4                    4
        ----------------------------------------
        | CLS  |      US         |          1  |
        ----------------------------------------
        | STR  |    US+1         |         SS  |
        --------------------------------------------
        | RTS  |    US           |       SS+1  | r |
        --------------------------------------------

And that's it, the user should now be connected to the logger at the serving site 🎉🫶

Standard Console 💜

Next, we agreed on an initial network standard console: 7-bit ASCII sitting in 8 bit fields with the eighth bit turned on, sent in contiguous streams 🍓 The specific codes are listed in appendix H of the IMP Operations manual, BBN report #1877. This seems to work with only some hardship on PDP-10s, and it's fine for everyone else 🌈

For break or interrupt, lots of systems use one of the standard characters. For systems that need a different kind of signal, this sent over the control link should do the trick ⭐

        1       1
       ------------
       |INR  |  r |
       ------------

This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry into the online RFC archives by Gottfried Janik 2/98 🧚💅