[157018] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: IPv4 address length technical design
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (George Herbert)
Wed Oct 3 15:31:58 2012
In-Reply-To: <20121003T191621Z@localhost>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 12:31:48 -0700
From: George Herbert <george.herbert@gmail.com>
To: Izaac <izaac@setec.org>, nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Izaac <izaac@setec.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2012 at 06:52:57PM +0200, Seth Mos wrote:
>> "Pick a number between this and that." It's the 80's and you can
>> still count the computers in the world. :)
>
> And yet, almost concurrently, IEEE 802 went with forty-eight bits. Go
> figure. I'm pretty sure the explanation you're looking for is: It was
> with the word size of the most popular minis and micros at the time.
The 48 bit MAC was 1980; notable that it was not primarily handled in
software / CPUs (ethernet key functionality is in dedicated interface
hardware, though the stack is MAC-aware obviously). CPU register bit
length is less critical when you have a dedicated controller of
arbitrary bittedness handling MACs.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert@gmail.com
