V6 still not supported

Sat Mar 19 01:26:19 UTC 2022

On 3/18/22 6:18 PM, bzs at theworld.com wrote:
> I remember in the 80s getting into a rather detailed debate with an
> OSI fan about how OSI put at least authorization into what we'd call
> the IP layer roughly, CLNP/CLNS/TP0-4.
>
> A lot of it came down to you send me your initial handshake and I
> first see if you're authorized and if not reject you right there.
>
> They were quite obsessed with authorization because they were quite
> obsessed with, basically, billing for every connection, who do I
> charge this connection to?
>
> Particularly in the 80s it seemed way too much overhead at way too low
> of a level to me.
>
> Almost 40 years later and maybe they were on to something.
>
> Unfortunately I still suspect it would have thrown the baby right out
> with the bathwater. The overhead involved would have limited network
> nodes (at the time) to big, expensive boxes, like PBX's, with
> intricate authorization and billing mechanisms rather than what made
> TCP/IP take off.
>
> Even in 1985 you could get a fully functional TCP/IP system running in
> cheap hardware most anyone with a steady job could afford rather than
> relegate such systems to SNA-like server/client architectures probably
> requiring intimate integration into telcos.
>
I wrote one of the first internet enabled laser printers (maybe the 
first) a couple of years later. It was work -- mostly TCP -- but it 
wasn't insurmountable. v6 was pretty ho-hum if it were to become a 
requirement. That and integrating with LPR which was a shitshow. The IP 
layer was trivial in comparison.

I'm willing to believe that the networking layer was more difficult, but 
I really question about *how much* more difficult it was.

Mike