[124602] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: legacy /8
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeffrey I. Schiller)
Fri Apr 2 19:13:24 2010
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:06:17 -0400
From: "Jeffrey I. Schiller" <jis@MIT.EDU>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <courier.000000004BB671E2.00007B21@blargh.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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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
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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