[ih] BGP vs EGP

[Bob Braden]

Please repeat after me (and I am paraphrasing Dave Mills' oft-repeated 
mantra): EGP was NOT a routing protocol, it was only a REACHABILITY
protocol.  For inter-domain routing, Internet used essentially static 
routing modulated by reachability information from EGP.

Early efforts by Mills and others to extend EGP into an inter-domain 
routing protocol failed.  There was an effort to design a global 
link-state routing protocol, but Eric Rosen (BBN) turned out a 
hard-to-read but ultimately convincing note about why this would not work.

The advent of NSFnet forced the community to solve the problem of 
inter-domain routing. Yakov Rekhter came up with the idea of path vector 
roting, which solved the looping problem, and BGP was born.

Bob Braden

PS: The anecdote is completely correct.