Greetings John and all On 18.11.21 21:54, John Gilmore wrote:
We succeeded in upgrading every end-node and every router in the Internet in the late '90s and early 2000's, when we deployed CIDR. It was doable. We know that because we did it! (And if we hadn't done it, the Internet would not have scaled to world scale.)
I want to highlight one (hopefully) entertaining point. There is evidence in Geoff's and Tony's graphs of when all of this happened because there was a drop in the number of routes in 1994. If you squint, you can see it here <https://bgp.potaroo.net/> just at the lower left-hand side of the graph. It's really funny to me because the scale of that graph has changed *dramatically* – bordering on two orders of magnitude. At the time the dip was a substantial percentage of the routes at the time. I will also point out that even though endpoints by-and-large were not involved, keeping the routers from falling down nevertheless was the result of an enormous effort and collaboration between researchers, developers, and operators, who I doubt very much would ever want to repeat that sort of experience. Eliot