[ih] ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Michael Grant

    > The address space (224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255) was very small, I
    > never understood how that was supposed to work in a global context.

The whole Internet is an _experiment_ that grew out out of control. Some
aspects (e.g. the moving of connection state into the endpoints) works well.
Some of it has been bodged into working (e.g. the addressing and routing
architecture). Multicast is another experient, one that was 1/4-baked - and
the addressing shows that.

    > From: Guy Almes 

    > The problem is the enormous hidden costs of doing it at the IP layer.
    > In contrast, there are many successful examples of applications that do
    > Multicast, but at the application layer.

I always thought that it was a mistake to try and do multicast completely
integrated into the internet layer. It made a lot more sense to me to do it
as a sub-layer on top of the internet layer, using multicast distribution
nodes: logically/architecturally seperate, but perhaps co-located in
switching nodes in implementations. (The way Van's fast TCP had the logically
separate IP and TCP layers integrated in the actual implementation.)

I also thought that it would better to have separate namespaces for the
groups (i.e. to name their members), and to identify their distribution
trees. All OBE, of course. As has been observed, the Internet has gotten too
large to evolve.

	Noel