[ih] Memories of Flag Day?

[John Gilmore]

I had a "tourist" account at the MIT-AI system running ITS, back in the
NCP days.  I used to log in to it over a TIP that had RS232 cables
quietly connecting it to a Telenet node.  I'd dial in to a local Telenet
access point, connect to the cross-connect's node and port, and be
talking to a TIP, where I'd "@o 134" to get to MIT-AI.

When NCP was turned off on the Flag Day, that stopped working.  At MIT,
as I understand it, they decided not to implement TCP/IP for ITS.  The
workaround for tourists like me was to borrow someone's account at
MIT-OZ, which had TCP support and could also talk to ITS (over
Chaosnet?).  So I'd connect from the TIP using TCP to MIT-OZ, and then
connect to MIT-AI.  It worked OK, though I had to remember when (and how
many times) to double the escape characters.  My access was via a dialup
modem, which was probably the slowest part of the whole system.

Moving to the present day...

I continue to see Internet old-timers who long nostalgicly for somebody,
somewhere, to force a "flag day" to shut down IPv4.  The IETF has
unfortunately been captured by these folks, who object to making even
tiny improvements to IPv4 protocols on the grounds that "we shouldn't
make it easier to use IPv4 because that would reduce the urgency of
switching to IPv6".  It is taken for granted in much of IETF that "IPv4
is dead, or it should be" even though it carries far more global daily
traffic, to a far broader range of locations, than IPv6 does.  There was
even a move to "declare IPv4 Historic" which would officially recommend
that nobody use it any more.  That draft RFC was approved in 2017 by the
Sunset4 working group on a vote of three zealots, but it got killed once
saner heads looked at the implications.  For a discussion of that
history, and pointers to the source materials, see section 4 of:

  https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01.txt

(The IETF, predictably, declined to support the publication of an RFC
describing this history or succinctly stating that IETF would continue
maintaining IPv4.)

	John