Thus spake "Joe Abley" <jabley@automagic.org>
On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 01:13:27PM -0500, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Because "Cee" is easier to pronounce than "slash twenty-four". Ease of use trumps open standards yet again :)
Nobody was talking. "/24" is easier to type than "class C". No trumps! Everybody loses!
I just write/say "C" unless the meaning would be ambiguous.
How many people learn about networks from certification courses or in school, anyway? It was always my impression that people learnt mainly by listening to other people.
If networking on the front lines is an informal oral tradition more than it is a taught science, then perhaps it's natural for obsolete terminology to continue to be "taught" long after it stopped having any relevance.
I'd bet most of the customers I deal with learned networking from OS manuals or CCNA study books, all of which still teach classful addressing as the primary method. All of the ones I work with use the term "C" or "class C" to refer to a /24, and all are noticeably slower when dealing with non-/24 masks. The point of communication is to get an idea across; if most of the people you communicate with don't understand slash notation, then you use terms they're familiar with even if they're imprecise or inaccurate. I think NANOG's ISP-centric membership may skew the perception of our lexicon's state. Most network operators are not ISPs. S