Re: How to pay $47 for a copy of RFC 793

And since we are tripping back through memory lane, Jon Postel and I 
co-authored RFC 980 which tells you how to order protocol documents, 
including the collections we made at SRI. Not sure I remember the 
price for these books, but to quote from the RFC itself:

"For hardcopy distribution from the NIC there is a charge of $5 for
 each RFC that is less than 100 pages, and $10 for each RFC that 
 is 100 pages or more to cover the cost of postage and handling
 (check, money order, or purchase order accepted)."

We had a special line printer for this purpose and a machine called a 
"burster", something I have not seen or heard about in about 25 years.
Time flies when you're having fun and stuck with ASCII documents :-)

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   Mobile: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: ole@cisco.com  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj
Skype: organdemo

On Mon, 9 May 2011, John C Klensin wrote:

> 
> 
> --On Sunday, May 08, 2011 15:06 -0700 Bob Braden
> <braden@isi.edu> wrote:
> 
> > I just discovered an astonishing example of misinformation,
> > shall we say, in the IEEE electric power community. There is
> > an IEEE standards document C37.118, entitled (you don't care)
> > "IEEE Standard for Synchrophasors for Power Systems
> > C37-118(TM)-2005", which is currently of great importance for
> > the instrumentation of the national power grid. I just noticed
> > that it references RFC 793, and for curiosity looked to see
> > how it was referenced. I found:
> > 
> >     [B8] RFC 793-1981,Transmission Control Protocol DARPA
> > Internet Program Protocol Specification.[12]
> >...
> > Now, it has always been IETF's (and even before there was an
> > IETF, Jon Postel's) policy to allow people to sell RFCs. What
> > astonishes me is that clever people in the IEEE don't know
> > RFCs are available free online. I guess RFCs remain so
> > counter-cultural that industrial types don't get it. I wonder
> > how many other IEEE standards contain similar RFC-for-pay
> > references..
> 
> Bob,
> 
> What you presumably remember, but others reading this may not,
> was just how many comments Jon made about the impossibility of
> preventing fools from throwing their money away.  And, of
> course, it is in the interest of Global Engineering Documents
> --which, in the era in which few folks had direct access to the
> Internet was one of the better sources for miscellaneous
> technical standards documents-- to let people continue to
> believe that they are a convenient and standard (sic) source.
> 
> 
> 
> --On Sunday, May 08, 2011 21:26 -0400 "John R. Levine"
> <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
> 
> >...
> > This isn't an enormous project, but it requires figuring out
> > which online libraries are worth getting into, making the
> > necessary arrangements with them (which may or may not involve
> > money), a batch process to load in all the existing RFCs, and
> > arrange with the production house to ensure that each new RFC
> > gets listed as it's published.  Most of these systems include
> > abstracts and forward and backward references, which will
> > doubtless require some debugging to make them work reliably.
> > 
> > Like I said, it's a good project for the new RFC series
> > editor.  It should be a lot easier than deciding how to put
> > Chinese names into RFCs.
> 
> +1
> 
> I do note, however, that RFCs appear to be listed in ACM's Guide
> to Computing Literature (essentially part of the ACM Digital
> Library at this stage).  Putting "Transmission Control Protocol"
> into the search mechanism turns up RFC 793 in a hurry.  And,
> behold, they have full text available and retrieving it works
> without any charges other than the access fees for the Digital
> Library itself.  "RFC Editor" is even on their list of
> publishers for search purposes.  
> 
> The problem is that the titles they index do not contain the RFC
> numbers, so looking up "RFC793" or "RFC 793".  That is not a
> decision to avoid indexing the series (which would require the
> process John outlines to reverse) but a bug.   I have filed a
> bug report as Digital Library feedback.
> 
>     john
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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