RFC 850 · UNKNOWN · 1983

Standard for interchange of USENET messages

Overview

RFC 850, “Standard for interchange of USENET messages”, is an Unknown document published in June 1983 by M.R. Horton. It has been obsoleted by RFC 1036 — refer to the newer document for the authoritative version. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.

Abstract

This memo is distributed as an RFC only to make this information easily accessible to researchers in the ARPA community. It does not specify an Internet standard. This RFC defines the standard format for interchange of Network News articles among USENET sites. It describes the format for articles themselves, and gives partial standards for transmission of news. The news transmission is not entirely standardized in order to give a good deal of flexibility to the individual hosts to choose transmission hardware and software, whether to batch news and so on.

Abstract as published in the RFC, via rfc-editor.org.

What “Unknown” means

The standards-track status of this early RFC was never formally classified.

Read this RFC

The canonical text of RFC 850 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.

Relationships to other RFCs
Obsoleted by
RFC 1036
Other RFCs from 1983

Who Is Online

In total there are 91 users online: 0 registered, 87 guests and 4 bots.

Most users ever online was 1,226 on 13 Jun 2026, 3:56 am.

Bots: Applebot Other Bot Other Crawler SemrushBot

Users active in the past 15 minutes. Total registered members: 354