[ih] Any suggestions for first uses of "e-mail" or "email"?

[John Day]

My understanding at the time from talking to numerous people was that those who knew how knew that handling variable length addresses was not really a problem and I have heard since that that many people who were concerned about that have said they were mistaken at the time.

Actually since addresses belong to layers rather than protocols, the point is moot.  One can have your cake and eat it too.

The real crime with not adopting CLNP was passing up a chance to reduce router table size by a factor of probably between 3 or 4. That would be real handy right about now. 

Now *that* was truly irresponsible, if not criminal.  We could be reducing the number of v4 routes to increase the number of v6 routes instead of the other way around. But then v6 was unnecessary to begin with, so was CLNP.

John
> On Aug 10, 2015, at 08:51, Craig Partridge <craig at aland.bbn.com> wrote:
> 
>> Ultimately, the concerns about potential change control arguments with ITU 
>> resulted using CLNP's address format for IPv6, only with a fixed length. 
>> (Those dealing with virtualization today will curse loudly someday when they 
>> discover that we actively chose to undo existing, working variable length 
>> addressing in defining IPv6...)
> 
> As someone who may bear some responsibility (I'd have to dig through too
> much stuff to be sure)...
> 
> Remember that parsing variable length addresses was more expensive and that
> in the mid-1990s, computational power in routers was on the borderline of
> being insufficient to keep up with network bandwidth. At the time,
> projections were that the problem would become much worse before it
> became better.  So it seemed irresponsible (at least to those of us
> desperately trying to keep routers working) to use variable length addressing.
> Those projections about computing power were right, but the period of
> difficulty was much shorter than anticipated -- now routers have lots of
> computational power and variable length addresses would not be a problem.
> 
> Craig
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