[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership
Noel Chiappa
jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed Oct 13 15:39:48 PDT 2010
> From: Louis Mamakos <louie at transsys.com>
> For a while, the generalized subnet architecture "supported"
> non-continguous subnet masks to distinguish the network part from the
> host part. I don't know what the driver for this was.
Pure serendipity. The basic mechanism used (the bit-mask) allowed
non-continguous masks as a natural consequence of the mechanism; we would
have had to specifically disallow them, and we didn't bother to. I seem to
recall we thought we'd leave them in, and see if people found some good use
for them.
Noel
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