[ih] Telnet's NVT

[Adriana C. Arrington]

Hello,

My name is Adriana Arrington and I am working with Chris
Edmondson-Yurkanan in reseaching the technical history of Telnet for the
THINK Protocols project.  At this time, I am reading about the development
of the Network Virtual Terminal (NVT).

The first mention of the NVT was in RFC 137, as far as I can tell.  How
and when did it actually first appear as a solution to the heterogeneous
terminal problem? How much of the NVT concept is based on the proposed but
never used Decode-Encode Language (DEL) and Network Interface Language
(NIL)?

The Data Reconstruction Service (DRS) transforms data from one form to
another instead of causing data to conform to a known standard, as in the
case of the NVT. What happened to this manner of solving the incompatible
data problem? Did Telnet, and specifically the NVT, solve this problem better?
What ever happened to DRS?

My main sources for NVT and these related topics have been the RFCs (of
course), 1970 and 1972 SJCC papers and "An Experimental Service for
Adaptable Data Reconfiguration" from the IEEE Transactions on
Communications (June 1972). Are there any other sources for these topics
(or any Telnet topic in genaral) that I should use?

Thanks,
Adriana Arrington

mailto:aca at cs.utexas.edu
mailto:a_arrington at mail.utexas.edu
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~aca