From: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!CSvax:cak
Newsgroups: net.followup
Title: Re: RE; UUCP addressing.
Article-I.D.: purdue.385
Posted: Tue Sep 21 09:39:17 1982
Received: Wed Sep 22 04:25:54 1982
References: ihuxp.230

Arpa addresses are centrally administered to a point -- if you're
strictly on the Arpanet, the address is just your IMP number (as
maintained by DARCOM) plus the host port on that IMP that you talk to.

The numbering of networks is also centrally administered, but once you
claim a network number, you can assign hosts on it any way you please.
At the moment, the folks at the Network Information Center at SRI
maintain a central database of all the hosts on the Internet; as the
nameserver services come up, this will probably go away.

We could probably claim a class B address from the Internet, and
adminster the 16 bits of host number as we pleased, but I don't see the
point! First off, those numbers are really only meaningful if you speak
the Internet Protocol; secondly, you still want names to map onto those
numbers, which should, of course be unique. So we're back to the same
problem of trying to keep a new uucp site from using a non-unique
name.

Cheers,
Chris Kent, Purdue CS