Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!sdcsvax!ucbvax!TWG.ARPA!dcrocker From: dcrocker@TWG.ARPA ("Dave Crocker") Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: RCTE Message-ID: <8709260045.AA22857@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: Fri, 25-Sep-87 20:36:00 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8709260045.AA22857 Posted: Fri Sep 25 20:36:00 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 27-Sep-87 06:56:47 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: "Dave Crocker" Distribution: world Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 24 Reviving the Remote Controlled Transmission and Echoing telnet option is an interesting idea. Certainly SOMETHING needs to be done. Part of the problem with the original protocol (my very first effort and it looks like it) was that it was not rich enough in maintaining synchronization. Stepping back a bit, it requires that the serving host allow the application to specify what kinds of characters are "interesting" (on the theory that the sending host can aggregate all the characters up to the interesting one and then send them in a batch). RCTE was based upon John Davidson's (then of Univ. of Hawaii) observation that Tenex (a derivative of which now runs on Decsystem-20s) had just such a feature. Unfortunately, it is not common to some well-known operating system. Even more interesting is the thought that such a protocol should be more ambitious. RCTE does not know anything about the terminal or the semantics of the session. A "display-oriented" protocol could be much more powerful. John Day, then of Univ of Illinois, began a campaign for such a telnet option and continued it for quite some time. I believe that a version is still in the protocol books. Perhaps we should dust it off and see why it shouldn't be aggressively implemented. Dave ------