RFC 64 (rfc64) - Page 1 of 4
Getting rid of marking
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group M. Elie
Request for Comments #64 UCLA
Getting Rid of Marking
Though we realize that this improvement is perhaps somewhat late
to be implemented, we believe that there exist better solutions than
marking and suggest a simple modification to the IMP-HOST interface
which would avoid it.
1. The harm.
Marking was introduced to suit the sending Host because it permits
the text of a message to start on a word boundary, however, it does not
suit the receiving Host with a different word length. Moreover,it
introduces in the message useless bits. Let us illustrate this by the
example of our Sigma 7, a 32 bit machine.
1.1 Inefficiency in Computation
Suppose we receive a message from an 18 bit machine (figure 1.1)
coded in 8 bit ASCII characters which will eventually become standard on
the network. In order to translate this message into our EBCDIC
internal code, for instance.
0 17 0 31
-------------------------- ------------------------------
| leader | | leader |
-------------------------- ------------------------------
| | 0 0 0 1| | 0 0 0 1 | |
-------------------------- ----------- |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| message | | message |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
figure 1.1
