Show HN: Read the RFCs That Built the Internet

I was working on a pre internet protocol stack in the early 1980s. It was called the "coloured book protocols" because each application and layer had a different colour spine. Email was "grey book mail" and in truth it was substantively the same as what we all know as rfc822 format. Sent over x.25, store and forward mechanisms up at application layer.

Obviously we looked at other protocol stacks. Like IP.

A colleague said to me one day "how can they call it 'simple mail transfer protocol' when it's a quarter inch thick pile of fanfold paper" pointing at the 132 column line printer printout on my desk of SMTP.. (which in turn was rfc821 at the time)

pentaphobe · 20 days ago

In fairness 2/3rds of that was probably a regex for email addresses :)

ggm · 20 days ago

Tried to write yacc/lex for that back in the day of bang addresses and decnet :: chains. What actually killed me was dealing with header line folding. I just couldn't wrap my head around the tokens and the value of CRLF and dealing with pushing things back on the input buffer.

Some things are a "you have to be this high" test to get in board and I wasn't.

stonecharioteer · 20 days ago

Oh wow.

I wonder how many of these stories are lost to time.