[129788] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Bellovin)
Sun Sep 19 21:54:19 2010
From: Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimhcc-o_4qLcP5VQxdkMQdVuvfPesRdC3TX-D6X@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2010 21:54:05 -0400
To: Bill Stewart <nonobvious@gmail.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Sep 17, 2010, at 5:20 46PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
> Sorry, fat-fingered something when I was trying to edit.
>=20
> On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Bill Stewart <nonobvious@gmail.com> =
wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Steven Bellovin =
<smb@cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
>>> No, they bought AT&T, which [...] But yes, SBC is the controlling =
piece of the new AT&T.
> Most of the wide-area ISP network is the old AT&T, while
> much of the consumer broadband grew out of the SBC DSL side.
Yup.
>=20
>>> 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.
>=20
> The AT&T bits kept some fraction of 135; I don't know how
> much without dredging through ARIN Whois, but at least 135.63/16 is on
> my desktop.
I know -- that's why I wrote "a good chunk", but I sure don't know who =
got what. (FYI, I'm still a very part-time AT&T employee.)
>=20
> If I remember correctly, which is unlikely at this point,
> 12/8 was the Murray Hill Cray's Hyperchannel network, which I'd heard
> didn't know how to do subnetting except on classful boundaries, so it
> could happily handle 16M hosts on its Class A, and in fact only had
> two or three.
Good point. I don't remember what time frame that was true, though. =
I'm certain about why Mark Horton got 12/8 and 135/8, but I don't =
remember the years, either.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
