[ih] When did "32" bits for IP register as "not enough"?

[Brian E Carpenter]

Jack,

> When NAT appeared, IMHO it took a lot of pressure off the address space,
> since the millions of small LANs could then share the same reserved
> address spaces like 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x (in memory of the ARPANET
> which had been retired).

But NAT for IP appeared *after* the concerns appeared. So I think Scott's note
about Frank Skolensky's extrapolations was the correct answer to Dave Taht's
question. (In my early IETF meetings I often had Sunday breakfast with Frank,
since we were both early risers. But that was already into the 1990s.)

BTW, NAT haters appeared as soon as NAT appeared.

NAT for non-IP was around much earlier. DECnet "hidden areas" were a
form of NAT, and at CERN we NATted a home-built network in the early
1980s since it had (iirc) 6-bit host addresses. It was that experience
that made me a NAT hater for evermore.

Regards
   Brian

On 2019-02-14 08:44, Jack Haverty wrote:
> On 2/13/19 11:08 AM, Dave Taht wrote:
> 
>> So, it seems obvious that address size problems plagued the arpanet
>> and earlier versions of IP. When did the writing show up on the wall
>> that the classful design wasn't working, and secondly that 32 bits
>> wasn't enough?
> 
> I don't recall hearing any concerns that the ARPANET address space was
> too small, other than the time when the "leaders" were expanded from 32
> to 96 bits.
> 
> This was the era when computers were big and expensive, so there weren't
> many of them.   What changed was the advent of minicomputers,
> workstations, and PCs, along with the various kinds of LANs that made
> computers cheap enough to have millions of them.
> 
> Despite that evolution, I don't recall much concern about address size
> in the early IP days.  Remember, at that point the Internet was an
> Experiment, and it was supposed to eventually go away when the
> CCITT/ISO/Industry deployed the "real" infrastructure system for
> computer communications.   The IPV4 address space was plenty big enough
> for all the anticipated experiments and early deployments, e.g., by
> DARPA and NSF, while waiting to transition to the "real" system.
> 
> Of course that never happened, and the Internet evolved as the only
> system which you could actually buy, install, and use.  The IPV4 address
> space only started to be a problem when ISPs started to proliferate, and
> each needed a block of addresses for its customers.
> 
> When NAT appeared, IMHO it took a lot of pressure off the address space,
> since the millions of small LANs could then share the same reserved
> address spaces like 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x (in memory of the ARPANET
> which had been retired).
> 
> /Jack Haverty
> 
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