[129655] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Bellovin)
Tue Sep 14 21:51:54 2010
From: Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <19600.8632.814275.641127@world.std.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:51:45 -0400
To: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Sep 14, 2010, at 9:30 32PM, Barry Shein wrote:
>=20
> On September 14, 2010 at 00:49 williams.bruce@gmail.com (Bruce =
Williams) wrote:
>>=20
>> And what does this "appeal to the ancient wisdom" have to do with
>> technology and business today anyway?
>=20
> The article claimed that AT&T is claiming (to the FCC I think it was)
> that net non-neutrality was an early design goal of the internet, so
> they should be allowed to do whatever it is they want to do.
>=20
> Well, of course it was, only big research sites got IMPs with real 56k
> connections. Little guys like Apple, e.g., had to live on X.25 links
> from CSNET. BU was hooked up for a while via a 9600bps "cypress" link
> (a Vax 11/725* later Sun3/50 imp-a-like, via a serial port.)
>=20
> And we won't even talk about who got /8s. AT&T got 2 if I remember
> right though that company had no relationship to this AT&T which is
> just a rename of SBC after they bought some AT&T assets which owned
> the original trademark which is kind of like the old "if my
> grandmother had wheels they'd call her a trolley car" but I digress.
No, they bought AT&T, which had an ISP business, a long distance =
business, a private line business, and AT&T Labs, as well as other =
miscellaneous pieces like the brand name. We can wonder if AT&T would =
have survived as an independent company, but it was a going concern and =
not in bankruptcy at the time of the transaction. But yes, SBC is the =
controlling piece of the new AT&T.
As for the two /8s -- not quite. Back in the 1980s, AT&T got 12/8. We =
soon learned that we couldn't make good use of it, since multiple levels =
of subnetting didn't exist. We offered it back to Postel in exchange =
for 135/8 -- i.e., the equivalent in class B space -- but Postel said to =
keep 12/8 since no one else could use it, either. This was all long =
before addresses were tight. When AT&T decided to go into the ISP =
business, circa 1995, 12/8 was still lying around, unused except for a =
security experiment I was running.* However, a good chunk of 135/8 =
went to Lucent (now Alcatel-Lucent) in 1996, though I don't know how =
much.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
*The early sequence number guessing attack tools required a dead host =
that would be impersonated by the attacker. By chance, one of the early =
tools used something in 12/8. I started announcing it from Murray Hill, =
to catch the back-scatter from the victims. We found some of that; we =
also found lots of folks who were using 12/8 themselves, probably =
internally.=
