nanog mailing list archives
Re: legacy /8
From: "Jeffrey I. Schiller" <jis () MIT EDU>
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:06:17 -0400
On 04/02/2010 06:38 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
I understand that they were A classes and assigned to large companies, etc. but was it just not believed there would be more than 126(-ish) of these entities at the time? Or was it thought we would move on to larger address space before we did? Or was it that things were just more free-flowing back in the day? Why were A classes even created? RFC 791 at least doesn't seem to provide much insight as to the 'whys'.
/8's were not given out to large companies. They were given out to *everyone*! In the beginning there was the ARPANET and it was considered a large network (it was certainly an expensive network!). The notion was that there would only be a small number of "large" networks, so 8 bits was enough to enumerate them. The original IP plan didn't have classes of networks at all. It was 8 bits of network and 24 bits of host-on-that-network. It was only after network numbers started to hit the early thirties that folks realized that there needed to be more networks and the "class-full" approach was invented. So most of the existing class A holders just happened to be the very early adopters (actually the original research and government organizations that were connected to the network). -Jeff -- ======================================================================== Jeffrey I. Schiller MIT Network Manager/Security Architect PCI Compliance Officer Information Services and Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Room W92-190 Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 617.253.0161 - Voice jis () mit edu http://jis.qyv.name ========================================================================
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Current thread:
- Re: legacy /8, (continued)
- Re: legacy /8 Owen DeLong (Apr 04)
- Re: legacy /8 Roland Perry (Apr 04)
- Re: legacy /8 Joe Greco (Apr 04)
- Re: legacy /8 Roland Perry (Apr 04)
- Commodore PET, was: Re: legacy /8 Jeroen van Aart (Apr 11)
- Re: Commodore PET, was: Re: legacy /8 Paul Vixie (Apr 11)
- alt.folklore.nanog (was:Re: Commodore PET, was: Re: legacy /8) Lamar Owen (Apr 14)
- Re: alt.folklore.nanog Jeroen van Aart (Apr 14)
- Re: legacy /8 Steven Bellovin (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Michael Dillon (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Jeffrey I. Schiller (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Mark Smith (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 03)
- Re: legacy /8 Matthew Kaufman (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Barry Shein (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 bmanning (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Randy Bush (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 bmanning (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 jim deleskie (Apr 02)
- Re: legacy /8 Robert Brockway (Apr 03)
- Re: legacy /8 David Conrad (Apr 03)