Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?

[smb at cs.columbia.edu (Steven Bellovin)]

On Sep 17, 2010, at 5:20 46PM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> Sorry, fat-fingered something when I was trying to edit.
> 
> On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Bill Stewart <nonobvious at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Steven Bellovin <smb at cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
>>> No, they bought AT&T, which [...]  But yes, SBC is the controlling piece of the new AT&T.
>          Most of the wide-area ISP network is the old AT&T, while
> much of the consumer broadband grew out of the SBC DSL side.

Yup.

> 
>>> As for the two /8s -- not quite.  Back in the 1980s, AT&T got 12/8.  We soon learned that we couldn't make good use of it, since multiple levels of subnetting didn't exist.  We offered it back to Postel in exchange for 135/8 -- i.e., the equivalent in class B space -- but Postel said to keep 12/8 since no one else could use it, either.  This was all long before addresses were tight.  When AT&T decided to go into the ISP business, circa 1995, 12/8 was still lying around, unused except for a security experiment I was running.*    However, a good chunk of 135/8 went to Lucent (now Alcatel-Lucent) in 1996, though I don't know how much.
> 
>         The AT&T bits kept some fraction of 135; I don't know how
> much without dredging through ARIN Whois, but at least 135.63/16 is on
> my desktop.

I know -- that's why I wrote "a good chunk", but I sure don't know who got what.  (FYI, I'm still a very part-time AT&T employee.)
> 
>         If I remember correctly, which is unlikely at this point,
> 12/8 was the Murray Hill Cray's Hyperchannel network, which I'd heard
> didn't know how to do subnetting except on classful boundaries, so it
> could happily handle 16M hosts on its Class A, and in fact only had
> two or three.

Good point.  I don't remember what time frame that was true, though.  I'm certain about why Mark Horton got 12/8 and 135/8, but I don't remember the years, either.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb