[ih] History of duplicate address tests

[John Day]

I wouldn’t call that a hack.  A hack either fixes a problem in a way not really consistent with the design or adds a feature not consistent with a design.  This seems to be a feature that was inherent to the design even if not in the minds of the designers. That is good! The way it is suppose to work, but seldom does.

> On Nov 30, 2022, at 12:21, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> From: John Kristoff
> 
>> I had thought of ARP, but wasn't it's use for duplicate address
>> detection essentially a "hack" that came later?
> 
> Absolutely. Having been a co-designer of ARP, I can assure you that
> such a use was not in the minds of Dave Plummer nor I.
> 
>> From: John Gilmore
> 
>> Were there any duplicate address detection methods used in the
>> 3-megabit Experimental Ethernet? 
> 
> No. We had our hands full merely getting stuff to work; protecting
> bozos from themselves was an un-affordable luxury.
> 
> I'm not sure people really grasp how under-resourced the internetting project
> was back then. A lot of things we _should_ have done only got done later
> (e.g. dynamic host configuration), or not at all. The hordes (how appropriate
> a word) of programmers who are busy writing networking code these days were
> beyond envisioning.
> 
> 	Noel
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