RFCs for a rainy afternoon

The Request for Comments (RFC) series of documents provide information, technical notes and standards for the Internet community. They are published by the RFC Editor, and most are developed by the IETF. RFCs are released all year round. Including 1st April. And RFC writers aren't entirely serious for all of the rest of the year either.

This is a collection of those RFCs that may provide enjoyable reading on a rainy afternoon.

RFCTitleYear
439 PARRY Encounters the DOCTOR 1973
527 ARPAWOCKY 1973
748 TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option 1978
968 Twas the Night Before Start-up 1985
1097 TELNET SUBLIMINAL-MESSAGE Option 1989
1121 Act One - The Poems 1989
1149 A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers 1990
1216 Gigabit Network Economics and Paradigm Shifts 1991
1217 Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research (CSCR) 1991
1300 Remembrances of Things Past 1992
1313 Today's Programming for KRFC AM 1313 Internet Talk Radio 1992
1437 The Extension of MIME Content-Types to a New Medium 1993
1438 Internet Engineering Task Force Statements Of Boredom (SOBs) 1993
1605 SONET to Sonnet Translation 1994
1606 A Historical Perspective On The Usage Of IP Version 9 1994
1607 A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY 1994
1776 The Address is the Message 1995
1882 The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas 1995
1924 A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses 1996
1925 The Twelve Networking Truths 1996
1926 An Experimental Encapsulation of IP Datagrams on Top of ATM 1996
1927 Suggested Additional MIME Types for Associating Documents 1996
2100 The Naming of Hosts 1997
2321 RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent 1998
2322 Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp 1998
2323 IETF Identification and Security Guidelines 1998
2324 Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) 1998
2325 Definitions of Managed Objects for Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware Devices using SMIv2 1998
2549 IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service 1999
2550 Y10K and Beyond 1999
2551 The Roman Standards Process -- Revision III 1999
2795 The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS) 2000
3091 Pi Digit Generation Protocol 2001
3092 Etymology of "Foo" 2001
3093 Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP) 2001
3251 Electricity over IP 2002
3252 Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport 2002
3514 The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header 2003
3751 Omniscience Protocol Requirements 2004
4041 Requirements for Morality Sections in Routing Area Drafts 2005
4042 UTF-9 and UTF-18 Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode 2005
4824 The Transmission of IP Datagrams over the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS) 2007
5241 Naming Rights in IETF Protocols 2008
5242 A Generalized Unified Character Code: Western European and CJK Sections 2008
5513 IANA Considerations for Three Letter Acronyms 2009
5514 IPv6 over Social Networks 2009
5841 TCP Option to Denote Packet Mood 2010
5984 Increasing Throughput in IP Networks with ESP-Based Forwarding: ESPBasedForwarding 2011
6214 Adaptation of RFC 1149 for IPv6 2011
6217 Regional Broadcast Using an Atmospheric Link Layer 2011
6592 The Null Packet 2012
6593 Service Undiscovery Using Hide-and-Go-Seek for the Domain Pseudonym System (DPS) 2012
6919 Further Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels 2013
6921 Design Considerations for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Communication 2013
7168 The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances (HTCPCP-TEA) 2014
7169 The NSA (No Secrecy Afforded) Certificate Extension 2014
7511 Scenic Routing for IPv6 2015
7514 Really Explicit Congestion Notification (RECN) 2015
8135 Complex Addressing in IPv6 2017
8136 Additional Transition Functionality for IPv6 2017
8140 The Arte of ASCII: Or, An True and Accurate Representation of an Menagerie of Thynges Fabulous and Wonderful in Ye Forme of Character 2017

Andrew McDonald <andrew{at}mcdonald.org.uk>