[ih] IPv8...

[Craig Partridge]

Yep, RFC is the first documented use and coined the term (I note we found a
hint of the idea in RFC 878 -- Andy Malis's idea of a logical address).
The idea grew out of some work Trevor and Walter were doing. They came to
me trying to figure out if they had more than the germ of an idea . During
our discussion we realized they'd devised an entirely new address class
with different semantics from uni/multi/broadcast!  So we (mostly me) wrote
it up, with a discussion of how it might fit into the Internet
architecture, and I reached out to some very savvy folks (listed in the RFC
acknowledgements) who helped us polish the idea.

After RFC 1546 there was an extended debate about whether anycast addresses
were useful and whether to carve out part of the IPv4 (and IPv6) address
space for them.  Walter and Trevor had a little testbed on which they'd
experimented, but that wasn't a serious deployment.  Walter, Trevor and I
all went on to other things and, as I recall, Walter and I (was not in
touch with Trevor at the time) were surprised and pleased when anycast was
used to support the root servers.

Craig

PS: I have this vague recollection that the first use of anycast post RFC
1546 was actually in ATM (for which anycast support was easy) for some form
of resource management -- but I can't find a note that supports or refutes
my recollection.

PPS: I want to call out the folks who served as reviewers before we
published RFC 1546.  Steve Deering thought anycast was a bad idea, and I
think Jon Postel was unsure about it, but both recognized that anycast was
something new that deserved to be explored publicly and helped us refine
our ideas.  (I suspect that's true of the others too -- they were all
helpful reviewers -- I just at least partly remember Steve and Jon's
contributions).

On Mon, Apr 20, 2026 at 12:24 PM John Kristoff <jtk at dataplane.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:02:11 -0600
> Craig Partridge via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> wrote:
>
> > As one of the co-inventors of anycast,
>
> Is IETF RFC 1546 the first documented use, and I presumably the
> co-authors on that document are the co-inventors?
>
> Rodney Joffe, once claimed to me, although I may be misrepresenting
> what he said, it was a long time ago, that he was the first to do
> anycast. I don't think he said he invented it, but for awhile that is
> the impression I had.  Later when I talked to Woody about this, he said
> he was the first. My assumption now is that Bill was the first to deploy
> it and Rodney was the first to "commercialize" it (via UltraDNS).
> Unless someone cares to suggest otherwise of course.
>
> John
>


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