Change in socket for TIP news facility
Notice of socket change for the TIP News facility at BBN-TENEX
Thomas, R., "Change in socket for TIP news facility", RFC 470, DOI 10.17487/RFC0470, March 1973, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc470>.
@misc{rfc470,
series = {Request for Comments},
number = 470,
howpublished = {RFC 470},
publisher = {RFC Editor},
doi = {10.17487/RFC0470},
url = {https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc470},
author = {R. Thomas},
title = {{Change in socket for TIP news facility}},
pagetotal = 1,
year = 1973,
month = mar,
} RFC text
Network Working Group Bob Thomas
Request for Comments: #470 BBN - TENEX
NIC #14799 March 13, 1973
Categories: Socket Numbers
Change in Socket for TIP News Facility
The Socket which supports the TIP News Facility has been changed to
socket 367 (Octal) at BBN-TENEX. TIP users should be uneffected by this
change since the TIP program has already been changed to ICP to the new
socket. Because some user TELNET programs have been implemented a
"news" command, the old socket will be maintained until April 15, 1973
to give implementers time to change to the new socket.
[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ]
[ into the online RFC archives by Alex McKenzie with ]
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§1Socket Migration for News Service
Bob Thomas of BBN-TENEX announced that the socket supporting the TIP News facility had been changed to socket 367 octal at BBN-TENEX. In the ARPANET architecture of the time, sockets were the endpoints for network communication, roughly analogous to ports in modern networks. This change reorganized the network addressing scheme for the news service, which provided network updates and information to TIP (Terminal Interface Processor) users.
The service that sends news to the network moved to a new address number to make things better organized.
§2Backwards Compatibility
TIP users who accessed the news facility through the TIP program directly were unaffected by the change, since the TIP program had already been updated to connect to the new socket. However, because some network implementers had written Telnet programs with hardcoded news commands that pointed to the old socket, the old socket was maintained until April 15, 1973. This grace period gave software implementers sufficient time to update their user Telnet programs to use the new socket address without breaking existing deployments.
Regular TIP users didn't notice anything, but people who built their own programs had a few weeks to fix them.
§3Transition Timeline
The change was announced on March 13, 1973, and the old socket would remain active until April 15, 1973. This three-month window was designed to be sufficient for network implementers to update their Telnet news client code. The grace period reflected the communication and development constraints of the era, when software updates required manual intervention and coordination across the distributed ARPANET.
Everyone had a couple of months to make their programs talk to the new address before the old one stopped working.