Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!uwmcsd1!marque!uunet!lts!amanda
From: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: ToasterNet (was Re: Running out of Internet addresses?)
Message-ID: <729@lts.UUCP>
Date: 1 Dec 88 16:32:51 GMT
References: <8811281821.AA00300@bel.isi.edu> <207@logicon.arpa> <1010@asylum.sf.ca.us>
Organization: InterCon Corporation, Reston, VA
Lines: 32

In article <1010@asylum.sf.ca.us>, romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us (John Romkey) writes:
> I want to see a protocol address space large enough to handle a node
> in each household appliance, each piece of electronic equipment, and
> several extras per household, office and vehicle. Traffic lights on
> the Internet. Stray toasters. And enough addresses left over to
> scatter hosts across the inner solar system.

This reminds me of a remark Gurshuran Sidhu made at an Apple networking
conference a couple years ago.  He described Ethernet addresses as having
been "designed to be intergalactically unique."

The biggest problem, I think, is that 32 bits (or 48, or whatever) is
certainly big enough to serve as a *physical* addressing scheme, but
we keep chopping up addresses so that we can have a *logical* addressing
scheme.  I mean, we have a Class C address, and we've got a whopping
four hosts.  That's 1.5% utilization.  Of course, it's nice to be able
to add hosts as we get them, and subnetting makes contiguous blocks A
Good Thing, but it still means that the address space is sparsely
populated if you think of it as a physical address space.

One advantage that I see IP having over OSI (from what I understand
about OSI addressing, anyway), is that the encoding scheme is very
simple, thus giving some of the advantages of both physical and
logical addressing.

I remember the NCP/TCP switchover.  It will be a lot harder the next time...

-- 
Amanda Walker			...!uunet!lts!amanda / lts!amanda@uunet.uu.net
			  InterCon, 11732 Bowman Green Drive, Reston, VA 22090
--
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." -- N. Negroponte