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| | RFC (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12) |
 | | Well-known joke RFCs have included 527 (“ARPAWOCKY”, R. Merryman, UCSD; 22 June 1973), 748 (8220;Telnet Randomly-Lose Option”, Mark R. Crispin; 1 April 1978), and 1149 (“A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers”, D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). |
 | | The first was a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP-IP documentation style, and the third a deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon (since actually implemented; see Appendix A). |
 | | The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work — they frequently manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions. |
| www.catb.org /~esr/jargon/html/R/RFC.html (277 words) |
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