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Although roughly 2,500 different RFCs have been published, most are not
currently relevant to Internet standards. Some RFCs document protocols that are
now obsolete, such as the Simple File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) documented in RFC
913. These protocols may once have been considered useful, but are no longer.
These protocols are considered historical protocols because they are of interest
only for historical purposes and are not intended to be implemented
on current systems. Some RFCs describe protocols that are proprietary and are
considered to be informational protocols. These include documents such as RFC
1898, “Cyber-
Cash Credit Card Protocol Version 0.8,” or RFC 1813, “NFS Version 3 Protocol
Specification,” which documents Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Network File System.
These protocols are documented for different reasons, though usually to
provide information to the community about the work being done by the owner of
the protocol. For example, Sun’s NFS protocol, while not an Internet standard,
is certainly an important protocol and is documented so that others
can write applications that are compatible with NFS.
Some RFCs are purely informational and do not document actual protocols.They may
summarize meetings or describe approaches to specific networking problems taken
by the author. Most informational RFCs are intended to
provide important information or to raise important questions.
One subset of informational RFCs includes April Fool’s documents, published on
April 1 of each year and conforming strictly to the RFC format. For example, one
of the best-known examples is RFC 1149, “A Standard for theTransmission of IP
Datagrams on Avian Carriers,” published April 1, 1990. The
earliest example I found is RFC 748, “TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option,”published in
1978.