The National Bureau of Standards has developed service and design specifications for transport and session protocols for use in computer system and network procurements. These protocols reside in layers four and five of the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection. This paper describes the services, interfaces, and internal behavior of the transport protocol. The transport (and session) protocol specifications were derived from the most recent developments within ISO on these protocols. Specific features were selected based on the needs of the agencies of the Federal Government within the United States, but they are consistent with the needs of any large organization engaged in the procurement or development of networks of heterogeneous computer systems.

The ARPA computer network (ARPANET) is a nationwide network of diverse autonomous computers connected via a message-switching store-and-forward communications subnet using leased wide-band (50-kbit/s) telephone lines. A primary objective of the ARPANET is to share preexisting programs and data. Many of the difficulties of using remotely generated programs and data are found to be simple format incompatibilities requiring data manipulations like character set conversion, header prefacing and stripping, packing and unpacking of repeated data, generating counters and flags, and field transposition. The data reconfiguration service (DRS) is an attempt to provide a convenient way of performing these data manipulations in order to mediate between superficially incompatible data streams connecting existing programs in the ARPANET. Desiring to match two incompatible input-output streams, an applications programmer specifies a data stream transformation (called a form) written in the data reconfiguration language (DRL). Associating the appropriate form name with the connection between his two programs, the programmer causes the DRS to follow his instructions on how the specified data streams are to be manipulated in the communication required to make the two programs cooperate over the ARPANET. Components of the DRS include the specification of its special-purpose data reconfiguration language, a form compiler to translate forms into fast-running transformation programs, an interpreter to perform high-speed data transformations at application program run time, and a standard set of ARPANET protocols for the routine handling of connections and form specifications between operating systems.

This paper describes a method for using sequential positional information to recognize handprinted Chinese characters, and a computer program which uses this method to provide a translation aid. The method is based on the fact that Chinese characters are drawn as a definite sequence of a few types of strokes. The program, which provides a direct man-computer communication via a RAND Tablet and a CRT display, simplifies using a Chinese dictionary by reducing the number of steps and the time required.