[ih] The invention of what we now call NAT
Greg Skinner
gregskinner0 at icloud.com
Wed Apr 23 14:04:00 PDT 2025
On Apr 23, 2025, at 12:50 PM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> From: Craig Partridge
>
>> I'm working from memory for the most part, so flaws may exist.
>
> Ditto.
>
>> Van Jacobson is credited as the initial thinker about NAT
>
> I have him in memory as the co-inventor, along with Paul Tsuchiya. Not
> partners, mind - independent inventors.
>
> I don't recall why Paul was working in that area (NAT is something I never
> had much time for - among other things, it makes the network more brittle, by
> moving state into the end routers - clearly a hack - even more so than BGP -
> so the details have been GC'd from my memory) - if he's still with us, and
> someone is in touch with him, they should ask him.
>
>> Van came up with NAT as a concept while serving on the ROAD WG
>
> IIRC, there was a ROAD meeting on the West Coast (not as part of an IETF),
> and that was were Van introduced his to us. But I had heard of Paul's before
> that.
>
> I think I still have my email from that era, squirreled away somewhere. I'm
> not up to looking, though.
>
> Noel
In one of your emails from that era (June 1992), you sent a Taxonomy of NAT variants (https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/big-internet/2gr4OOWRk7VrweWByd1cJ7Kjc8M/) to the big-internet list.
--gregbo
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