[ih] NIC numbers [Was: The history of "This" 0.0.0.0/8 network?]

[Eric Gade]

Btw there are hard copies of a great number of NIC documents at the
Computer History Museum archives as part of Jake Feinler's collection. She
kept a lot of stuff!

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:39 Alex McKenzie <aamsendonly396 at gmail.com wrote:

> In the late 1960's and early 1970's the NIC was the Network Information
> Center, run under ARPA contract by Doug Englebart's "Augmentation Research
> Center" at SCI.  The NIC had the task of collecting all the documents
> discussing the network ARPA was planning and implementing, and making these
> documents available to the community as appropriate.  Every incoming
> document was given a number - these are the NIC numbers, and the NIC could
> retrieve documents using this number.  When the RFC series was started by
> Steve Crocker, RFCs were part of the document stream entering the NIC, and
> therefore they were assigned NIC numbers.  Of course, as part of the RFC
> series, they were also assigned RFC numbers, at first by Steve Crocker, and
> later by others.  Every RFC had both a NIC number (which is rarely
> mentioned) and an RFC number. Although it was not an RFC, the Host-Host
> Protocol spec (NCP) did have a NIC number.
>
> At the time the ARPAnet was being developed, the NIC distributed all RFCs
> and certain other documents (including the Host-Host Protocol spec, and
> later the Protocol Handbook, the ARPAnet Directory, and the Resource
> Handbook) to all locations designated by ARPA as "ARPAnet sites" by US
> mail, addressed to the "Site Liaison".  The Site Liaison was responsible
> for internal distribution of the documents (as appropriate) within the site.
>
> Cheers,
> Alex
>
> Cheers,
> Alex
>
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 6:58 PM Michael Greenwald <mbgreen at seas.upenn.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> On 2019-02-12 15:04, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> > On 2/12/2019 12:37 PM, Alex McKenzie wrote:
>> >> If you want to know about NCP, see RFC # 6529.  The NCP spec was not
>> >> originally an RFC, since it was a specification, not a "request" for
>> >> comments.
>> >
>> > Lots of early RFCs were specifications.  FTP and Telnet, for example.
>> > And NCP was developed by the same community, wasn't it?
>> >
>> > And there are 3 sub-100 RFCs talking about NCP.  So it's interesting
>> > the
>> > the protocol itself didn't make it into the series back then.
>>
>> The NCP protocol spec was always available in the Arpanet Protocol
>> Handbook,
>> which collected protocol specifications equally from both RFC's and
>> NIC's.
>> I am pretty sure NCP was a NIC. I am sure it was in the protocol
>> handbook.
>> The Arpanet Protocol Handbook was available in every office I sat in at
>> MIT
>> in those days, so the relevant NICs and RFCs seemed equally available.
>> So I didn't feel that it not existing in an RFC form was a lack in any
>> way. NIC vs. RFC didn't make much difference to me, then.
>> I imagined that NICs were more "finished" and more "official" than RFCs,
>> and
>> also NICs seemed to apply to the ARPA net, and RFC's to the Internet.
>> Perhaps
>> this is just a reflection of my ignorance.
>>
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