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1436 | |
March 01st, 2018 | |
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I've been geeking out hard all day about RFCs. Someone on Mastodon | |
posted about how CSV as a format was never needed and only came | |
into existence because people at IBM and Bell Labs never read | |
RFC20 [0], the definition of ASCII. ASCII has in its character set | |
fields for separating ... fields, and groups and rows. 4 levels of | |
heirarchy, to be exact. With those we never needed to worry about | |
properly quoting stuff in CSV! | |
Mind. Blown. | |
So I tore through it (it's a short RFC) and it was a fascinating | |
window into the past. I felt exactly as I had as a kid when I saw | |
the Declaration of Independence. This was a marker in history, | |
a relic of communication. The old RFCs feel like that to me. | |
I know I felt that way when I read RFC1436: The Internet Gopher | |
Protocol [1]. I guess RFCs are cool things to go read for fun. | |
Huh, who knew? | |
Anyway, to kind-of "celebrate" my nerdy excitement, I'm going to | |
adopt using 1436 as a synonym for Gopher. Now you know what I'm | |
referring to if you ever see that in the future. Maybe I'll link | |
back here the first couple times... yeah. | |
Join me in 1436ing! | |
[0] RFC 20 - ASCII format for Network Interchange | |
[1] RFC 1436 - The Internet Gopher Protocol |