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Vint Cerf on mistakes he made in TCP/IP

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Vint Cerf on mistakes he made in TCP/IP

#5

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

Cerf: "I'm serious, the decision to put a 32-bit address space on there was the result of a year's battle among a bunch of engineers who couldn't make up their minds about 32, 128 or variable length. And after a year of fighting I said -- I'm now at ARPA, I'm running the program, I'm paying for this stuff and using American tax dollars -- and I wanted some progress because we didn't know if this is going to work. So I said 32 bits, it is enough for an experiment, it is 4.3 billion terminations -- even the defense department doesn't need 4.3 billion of anything and it couldn't afford to buy 4.3 billion edge devices to do a test anyway. So at the time I thought we were doing a experiment to prove the technology and that if it worked we'd have an opportunity to do a production version of it. Well -- [laughter] -- it just escaped! -- it got out and people started to use it and then it became a commercial thing. So, this [IPv6] is the production attempt at making the network scalable. Only 30 years later."

[1] https://youtu.be/mZo69JQoLb8?t=815 "Google IPv6 Conference 2008: What will the IPv6 Internet look like?"

Re: Vint Cerf on mistakes he made in TCP/IP

#7

Post by checkyoursudo »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #5

Cerf: "I'm serious, the decision to put a 32-bit address space on there was the result of a year's battle among a bunch of engineers who couldn't make up their minds about 32, 128 or variable length. And after a year of fighting I said -- I'm now at ARPA, I'm running the program, I'm paying for this stuff and using American tax dollars -- and I wanted some progress because we didn't know if this is going to work. So…

This is a good lesson. I've done a lot of pilot studies, prototypes, proof-of-concept experiments. It is scary^1 how many times "let's just get this tested and see if it even works" turns into "welp, that worked and we don't have time or funding to do another one, so that's the final version." The constraint is often time. Gotta get a product out, or run an follow-on experiment that depended on the first, or submit a paper or funding application, or whatever.

Test the thing you want to test!

1. Not scary like fear, just like, I don't know, astonishing.

Re: Vint Cerf on mistakes he made in TCP/IP

#8

Post by kragen »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #6
ksec wrote: post #2

Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.

It is possible 64-bits might have discouraged adopters who didn't want to waste expensive unnecessary extra bits at the time, so TCP/IP might not have taken off.

the ipv4+tcpv4 header is minimally 320 bits long so i don't think so

Re: Vint Cerf on mistakes he made in TCP/IP

#10

Post by Dalewyn »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #7
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #5

Cerf: "I'm serious, the decision to put a 32-bit address space on there was the result of a year's battle among a bunch of engineers who couldn't make up their minds about 32, 128 or variable length. And after a year of fighting I said -- I'm now at ARPA, I'm running the program, I'm paying for this stuff and using American tax dollars -- and I wanted some progress because we didn't know if this is going to work. So…

This is a good lesson. I've done a lot of pilot studies, prototypes, proof-of-concept experiments. It is scary^1 how many times "let's just get this tested and see if it even works" turns into "welp, that worked and we don't have time or funding to do another one, so that's the final version." The constraint is often time. Gotta get a product out, or run an follow-on experiment that depended on the first, or submit a…

An old Russian proverb goes: There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
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