IPv4 address length technical design

Wed Oct 3 19:44:16 UTC 2012

Perhaps worth noting (for the archives) that a significant part of the early
ARPAnet was DECsystem-10's with 36-bit words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

Tony Patti
CIO
S. Walter Packaging Corp.

-----Original Message-----
From: George Herbert [mailto:george.herbert at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 3:28 PM
To: Tony Hain
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: IPv4 address length technical design

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Tony Hain <alh-ietf at tndh.net> wrote:

It's worthwhile noting that the state of system (mini and
microcomputer) art at the time of the 1977 discussions was, for example, the
Intel 8085 (8-bit registers; the 16-bit 8086 was 1978) and 16-bit PDP-11s.
The 32-bit VAX 11/780 postdated these (announced October 77).

Yes, you can do 32 or 64 bit network addressing with smaller registers, but
there are tendencies to not think that way.