[ih] Did the MIL-STD matter? [IETF relevance (was Memories of Flag Day?)]

[Jack Haverty]

You're right.  I missed that too.

But did any of the email RFCs "Standards" ever become MIL-STDs like TCP 
and IP did?   DoD was the actual customer, and from their point of view 
RFC822 was lacking some functionality needed for military use.   Perhaps 
that prevented it becoming a MIL-STD?   Or perhaps whoever orchestrated 
the TCP and IP MIL-STDs wasn't aware of SMTP, RFC822, ICMP, et al as 
being part of the DoD protocol suite to be declared a MIL-STD?  Same 
perhaps with FTP, Telnet, DNS, NTP, etc etc.?   Who was expected to push 
other "Internet Technology" to become MIL-STDs?

Perhaps Historians will figure it out...

Jack


On 9/5/23 11:18, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 9/5/2023 11:05 AM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> IIRC, SMTP defined a mechanism for sending bunches-of-bytes between 
>> two machines.   RFC822 defined a particular structure and syntax for 
>> those bytes.  By not mandating RFC822, DoD left open the possibility 
>> of developing other schemes for organizing that content. 
>
> Well, in fact, RFC 821 does mandate RFC 822:
>
>> mail data
>>
>>        A sequence of ASCII characters of arbitrary length, which conforms
>>        to the standard set in the Standard for the Format of ARPA
>>        Internet Text Messages (RFC 822  <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc822>  [2  <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc821#ref-2>]).
>
> However this was indirect enough to make it harder to find when 
> compiling specs for the 3-volume tome.
>
> And it misses the use of RFC 822 without SMTP.  This was relevant to 
> the Internet in terms of (not) facilitating gatewaying with other 
> email services.
>
> d/
>
> -- 
> Dave Crocker
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
> mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social