20402 routing entries

Mon Apr 18 02:22:24 UTC 1994

Peter,

 > When people got network numbers in the past they were getting addresses 
 > for the research Internet.  It is important to understand that the 
 > research Internet was a great thing, but we are now working on the 
 > global public Internet and we desperately needed new routing and addressing 
 > systems.  We should establish that we are in a transition from the 
 > research Internet to the global public Internet and we subsequently

I don't think this will fly.  I was around when we had a "research
internet".  I even had two class A addresses assigned to me [yes, I know
I should have kept them :-) ].  I think that was quite a while ago and
does not apply to the majority of internet sites today.  Certainly not
for all of the sites labeled as commercial under the AUP.

 > address space to make this work.  Reasoning by analogy with the phone system
 > is a powerful argument.  People change phone numbers all the time, they 
 > don't absolutely revolt  because the phone system is so valuable.

The phone number analogy does not apply here.  When you phone number
changes (and in most cases today it is only the area code, not the local
number) the telephone still works.  This is not the case for computers
and routers.  They break.  Some hosts may not even boot.  When the phone
number changes and someone dials the old number the user gets a recording
with the new number to dial.  We have not built the current internet to
do anything like this.

Bob