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

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

>Going to that web site, you find:
>
>*RFC 793* *- Complete Document*
>*Revision / Edition: 81    Chg:    Date: 09/00/81 *
>TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL DARPA INTERNET PROGRAM PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION

Yes, that's ridiculous, but in reality it's our fault as much as
theirs.  Whoever wrote PC37.118 probably copied the reference to RFC
793 from some older standards document using cut and paste, which
someone else copied from some standard written back in the 1980s when
most industrial users weren't on the Internet.  In 1985 if you wanted
a copy of an RFC, and didn't happen to know someone who was hooked up
to the Internet and understood FTP, sending an order to GED to get a
paper copy and have it charged to the company's account was a
perfectly reasonable thing to do.  Even now, if you work at General
Electric, how much time is it worth to avoid spending $47 of the
company's money? Five minutes, maybe.

Today if you're an IEEE type, and you wonder where to find RFC 793, or
you're wondering what RFC 793 is about, and you look it up in IEEE
Xplore, the online library that all electrical engineers use, and that
their employers have site subscriptions for, you'll find ... nothing.
Yes, you can find it in Google, but Google isn't a particularly good
place to look for engineering papers.  Xplore is.  RFCs aren't in the
ACM Digital Library, either, same problem.

If we want the world to use RFCs, we desperately need to make them
easier to find in the places where technical users look for them.
Getting them indexed in Xplore and ACM DL and whatever their equivalents
are in Europe and Asia would be a good project for the new RFC Editor.

R's,
John