Re: legacy /8

["Jeffrey I. Schiller" <jis () MIT EDU>]

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

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Jeffrey I. Schiller
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