Whoa; the 3 network?

Tue Dec 23 16:53:58 UTC 1997

At 07:08 AM 12/23/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Funky discovery...  question is, why does GE need such massive addr space?
>:)
>
>-=asr
snip
>> 
>> [root at newspeer1 /root]# whois 3.0.0.0  
>> General Electric Company (NET-GE-INTERNET)
>>    One Independence Way
>>    Princeton, NJ  08540
>> 
>>    Netname: GE-INTERNET
>>    Netnumber: 3.0.0.0

The Princeton address is the same as the old RCA company division that did
DARPA and ARPA gov't contracting, so that address space once belonged to
RCA "in the beginning".  I have personal experience in a past life doing
military DARPA work with RCA, nearly twenty years ago, long before they
formed RCA Astro and built communications satellites.  This address space
was given to RCA for DARPA work *only* way back then or earlier.  RCA was
one of the *first* contractors in the TCP/IP address space, and we worked
on the very first gov't. task at the inception with them.  No such work has
been done for years, and there is no reason for RCA/GE to have this address
space anymore.

Perhaps the real issue is - now that RCA was swallowed up years ago by the
mighty GE in a lengthy acquisitions process, and no longer has any
defensible need for this much address space, why do they still have it?  It
is damn sure not being used for what it was originally intended, nor is it
being used to anywhere near 80% of its capacity.

I did a casual sequential-countup scripted "ping -a" on a small slice of
3.0.0.0, and found almost no working domains within this address space.

Ever wonder?   How can they get away with keeping this much address space
and NOT be using it, when we all jump through hoops to get our own little
blocks of net numbers allocated?

Just challenging the status quo again, (gave up tilting at windmills
because my horse ran away.....)

Randall