11–20 of 167 posts
Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.
I dont really think this is a mistake. Its not like there are great options even now for end2end security on the transport layer (like we have vpns but they mostly require having preshared secrets). It would have been pretty impossible back in the day and added a lot of friction
Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.
Routinely looking up things in hashes was not common back then. Hashing was computationally expensive when routers ran on little machines with well under 1 MIPS. A huge flat address space was not feasible with memory costs at the time. Nor was keeping huge routing tables in sync well understood. There had to be some cheap way to make routing decisions based on the IP address.
Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.
"AAA.CA" becomes 4143.414141, routers will find the best route for 4143 and anycast ti 414141., the apex AAA in this case would also be the ASN equivalent for bgp type routing and the TLD CA would also be the PKI certificate authority used to validate both routing updates and address ownership by the applications on either end. No port numbers either, the full address should describe the layer4+ addresses, so the full address user types instead of https://AAA.CA:8443, it becomes HTTPS.8443..AAA.CA (.. meaning anycast to the closest endpoint).
A good protocol is the easy part, the hard part is getting all the big networking companies and their engineers to agree on something.
Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.
I really wish we just did ipv4 on 64 but addresses. IPv6 is nearly a totally different paradigm, and has lead to adoption pain. Biggest being usability taking a back seat. People are being forced into using ipv6 not cause they want to, but from ip space exhaustion.
IPng (IPv6) was designed when the original paradigm existed, not what we have now-a-days.
So, if we actually had been on track to do IPv6 in the decade it was defined, we could have gone a totally different way. Instead due to the rapid growth of the Internet in the mid 90's, IPv4 was morphed into something different and IPv6 had its own model until we started to need it again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.
He made the right choice. the world will adapt, eventually.
I'd be willing to bet IPv6 wont be the last network upheaval we'll have as a civilization. (assuming we dont wipe ourselves out first)
What do you think will happen if we generate some really really big AI, and they realize that they'll be super reliable if we made every synapse have its own IP, then we network all the AI's together as each AI to behave as its own synapse node :-D
IPv256?
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…
- If it fails: welp, we were right to not spend months on this discussion.
- If it wildly succeeds: welp, it's now too costly to change for so many users.
Having a mild and steady usage growing curve is a blessing that's too often overlooked.