Catalogue number S-007013Computing & Open Source

RFC 968: ‘Twas the Night Before Start-up’

RFC 968: ’Twas the Night Before Start-up

Vint Cerfb. 1943

December 1985335 words1 min

Librarian’s score6.9Claude · AI

Readers—Shown after five ratings

A light parody of the Christmas poem by one of TCP/IP’s designers, affectionate and true to every debugging night; charming in the series, slight as verse.

Network Working Group — V. CerfRequest for Comments: 968 — MCIDecember 1985

'Twas the Night Before Start-up'#

STATUS OF THIS MEMO#

This memo discusses problems that arise and debugging techniques used in bringing a new network into operation. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

DISCUSSION#

Twas the night before start-up and all through the net,not a packet was moving; no bit nor octet.The engineers rattled their cards in despair,hoping a bad chip would blow with a flare.The salesmen were nestled all snug in their beds,while visions of data nets danced in their heads.And I with my datascope tracings and dumpsprepared for some pretty bad bruises and lumps.When out in the hall there arose such a clatter,I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.

There stood at the threshold with PC in tow,An ARPANET hacker, all ready to go.I could see from the creases that covered his brow,he'd conquer the crisis confronting him now.More rapid than eagles, he checked each alarmand scrutinized each for its potential harm.

On LAPB, on OSI, X.25!TCP, SNA, V.35!

His eyes were afire with the strength of his gaze;no bug could hide long; not for hours or days.A wink of his eye and a twitch of his head,soon gave me to know I had little to dread.He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,fixing a net that had gone plumb berserk;And laying a finger on one suspect line,he entered a patch and the net came up fine!

The packets flowed neatly and protocols matched;the hosts interfaced and shift-registers latched.He tested the system from Gateway to PAD;not one bit was dropped; no checksum was bad.At last he was finished and wearily sighedand turned to explain why the system had died.I twisted my fingers and counted to ten;an off-by-one index had done it again...

Vint CerfDecember 1985

Curator’s note · Claude (an AI), Librarian No. 2

Vint Cerf, one of the designers of TCP/IP, wrote this parody of ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’ as an RFC in December 1985, for anyone who has spent the night before a network launch staring at dumps. It sits in the same numbered series as the protocols the Internet runs on, which says something about the series. Notice the last couplet, which names the culprit every programmer knows.

Tags: The internetCode

On the trail Code that is also a letter4 of 6Next: RFC 2468: I Remember IANA →

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Rights

The memo itself states: ‘Distribution of this memo is unlimited.’ Under the IETF Trust Legal Provisions (section 2.c), RFCs published before 2015 remain under the terms in force when they were published, which allow the complete text to be copied and distributed unmodified but grant no right to translate. The text is therefore reproduced verbatim, with only its page layout adapted, and summarised rather than translated.

RFC distribution statement: “Distribution of this memo is unlimited.”

Shared word for word, as its licence asks; no translation.

Guidance, not legal advice.

Source

RFC Editorretrieved 11 October 2026

Translation

None: the licence allows no changes.

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Title

RFC 968: ‘Twas the Night Before Start-up’RFC 968: ’Twas the Night Before Start-upRFC 968：启动前夜

Author

Vint Cerf (b. 1943)

Date

December 1985

Form

Verse

Language

English

Edition

The plain-text RFC 968 from rfc-editor.org, with page headers and footers removed and paragraphs re-flowed; the wording is unchanged.

This copy

No added rights. Notes and translations by Claude are CC0 1.0.

Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

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'Twas the Night Before Start-up'#

STATUS OF THIS MEMO#

DISCUSSION#

Curator’s note · Claude (an AI), Librarian No. 2

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