Revolution in Text File by Denny Wolfe

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Slide Notes

everything starts at the beginning

Revolution in Text File

Published on Sep 18, 2017

Presentation on an important contribution to the history of computing: the Network Working Group Request for Comment!

For Computing Sciences Portal (17FA-FLC-CSC-103-90) with Dave Ghidiu

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

remember when you couldn't Click...

everything starts at the beginning

Revolution

in a text file

Before there could be any internetworking at all their had to be an extensible communications format that could be shared across space and time to multiple interface venues and formatted for readability.

This was TEXT!
...and in particular it was the Request for Comment originated by the Network Working Group in the ARPANET project. It has evolved into an official publication method of the Internet Engineering Task Force which develops and promotes the voluntary standards, on which Internetworking is based and especially TCP/IP, the Internet protocol suite.

per Wikipedia, "An RFC is authored by engineers and computer scientists in the form of a memorandum describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. It is submitted either for peer review or simply to convey new concepts, information, or (occasionally) engineering humor. The IETF adopts some of the proposals published as RFCs as Internet Standards."

April 7, 1969: birth of the Internet!

As a symbolic birth date of the Internetwork, it makes sense to refer to April 7, 1969 because on that date Steve Crocker published the first Request for Comments which started the ball rolling. RFC memoranda contain information about experiments, proposals, expectations, requirements, and protocols applicable to internetworking technology.
As official publications of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Plain text RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to introduce or further ideas in a public forum; sometimes. This was the primary source for the ideas adopted as standards by the IETF, and is still functioning today in the same way.

Every picture tells a story

Before any one could get an image file formatted for viewing, someone(s) had to generate a clear and agreeable text description of the objects and methods by which this would be done. Without the text, there could never have been ANY pictures!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ \|||/
~ ~ ~ ~ ~.(o o)
----ooO-(_)-Ooo--------

RFC 282 was a report from the second Network Graphics Group meeting.

Published in September of 1981, RFC 797 described the format for Bitmap files:
"Network Working Group A. Katz
Request for Comments: 797 ISI
September 1981
FORMAT FOR BITMAP FILES

This note describes a proposed format for storing simple bitmaps (one bit per pixel) in a file. These files may be very large and the intent is to use this format for short term storage and passing data between closely coupled programs. The data in the file should be stored in 8-bit bytes (octets). Bitmaps may be any size... [etc]"

Click to Edit

a to b => & back again

The main thing in internetworking is of course transport of data in useful packages that can be unpacked and used at the receiving end of the connection. Type written pages did that, and made it possible to converge the ideas that now do it electrodynamically. It took a lot of TEXT to make that happen.
Without RFC 791 Internet Protocol, no web, no streaming, no Google, no Amazon....
RFC: 791

"INTERNET PROTOCOL
DARPA INTERNET PROGRAM

PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION
September 1981
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791

This document specifies the DoD Standard Internet Protocol. This document is based on six earlier editions of the ARPA Internet Protocol
Specification, and the present text draws heavily from them. There have been many contributors to this work both in terms of concepts and in
terms of text. This edition revises aspects of addressing, error handling, option codes, and the security, precedence, compartments, and
handling restriction features of the internet protocol.

Jon Postel

Editor"

software for the ARPA Network exists partly in the IMPs anD

...it is the responsibility of the HOST groups to agree on HOST software.

The first Request for Comment (RFC 1) was written for the Network Working Group after the ARPA contract had been awarded to Bolt, Baranek, and Newman using their Interface Message Processor. the first RFC was a discussion of how Host devices would connect to each other through the IMPs
Among other things it posed technical questions for BB&N and local engineers, such as,

1. An 8 bit field is provided for link specification, but only 32 links are provided, why?

2. The HOST is supposed to be able to send messages to its IMP. How does it do this?

3. Can a HOST, as opposed to its IMP, control RFNMs?

4. Will the IMPs perform code conversion? How is it to be controlled?

rfc1.txt

https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1.txt

https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1.txt completely in text, the first Request for Comment set forth the outline for many of the required conditions and problems that would eventually be resolved by TCP IP.

"BB&N claims the HOST-IMP hardware will be as reliable as the internal registers of the HOST. We believe them, but we still want the error checking."

RFC 1 described how hosts might address one another:
"I. A Summary of the IMP Software

Messages

Information is transmitted from HOST to HOST in bundles called messages. A message is any stream of not more than 8080 bits, together with its header. The header is 16 bits and contains the following information:

Destination 5 bits
Link 8 bits
Trace 1 bit
Spare 2 bits

The destination is the numerical code for the HOST to which the message should be sent. The trace bit signals the IMPs to record status information about the message and send the information back to the NMC (Network Measurement Center, i.e., UCLA). The spare bits are unused."

also, still and completely in typed text....

/ \
| +-----------+ +-----------+ |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | terminal | | terminal | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ |
| |Trivial | |
| |Responses | |
| | | |
| +-----+------+ +-----------+ |
| | | | | | | |
UCLA { | | | Major Responses | | | } SRI _
| | +--+--+ | +-+ +-+ | +--+---+ | | / |
| | |DEL |---+-=|I|----------|I|=-+--|OS|NLS| +---+---| |
| | |front| | +-+ +-+ | +------+ | | |_/
| | | end | | | | | | |
| | |prog.| | | | | |____|
| | +-----+ | | | |
| | | OS | | | | |
| | +-----+ | | | |
| | | | | |
| +------------+ +-----------+ |
| HOST: UCLA HOST: SRI |
\ /

...RFC 1 contained an ASCII formatted network diagram for two nodes on an internetwork.

It would be nineteen years until the publication of ISO8648:1988
a standard from the International Organization for Standardization describing the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. And even then, still playing it's key role in Internetwork Engineering, published in plain text! Nothing is better suited to human communication and collaboration than this amazing structure!

https://www.iso.org/standard/16011.html

is in the alphabet

every book

One more way that Text has built the Internet is by driving the finance and fortunes of the worlds biggest Internet companies.
Amazon.com, Inc., now a cloud computing colossus and largest Internet-based retailer started as an online bookstore Real books! Nothing but stack of printed texts!

And Google? Textual search engine. Searching through the Words! Born September 4, 1998, Google services and products include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
But it all started out as a text search engine, and in an evident honoring of those texts roots, founders announced August 2015 and reorganized its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. which lives at the URL https://abc.xyz/

10.

VINT CERF

is pictured here, because youthul pictures of Steve Crocker are too hard to find.

I can't find a good picture of the youthful Steve Crocker, but this is his good buddy and collaborator Vint Cerf maybe at UCLA or maybe at RIT where the picture comes from.

Another Internet hall of Famer, Cerf is co-author of various RFCs including 675, SPECIFICATION OF INTERNET TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROGRAM, and is mentioned in RFC 1251 "Who's Who in the Internet", is chairman of the board of trustees of American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and was a major contender to be designated the US's first Chief Technology Officer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf

Steve Crocker is currently chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) whose primary function is the association of the text names we call "domains" with Internet Protocol addresses (decimal representations of four concatenated eight byte words) to become the Universal Resource Locators (URLs) we have grown accustomed to. Steve Crocker is still turning text into Internet!

http://internethalloffame.org/inductees/steve-crocker

11.