On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, Joe Abley wrote:
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.
Well, maybe, if you define "listening to people" as "reading what people write".
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.
Actually, I would assume it to be the other way around: if you only communicate with people who are active in the field who are aware of all the new tricks, how are you going to learn about obsolete stuff? About classfulness: I think it's more relevant, even today, than many people like to admit. Why is it that I can type "network 192.0.2.0" in my Cisco BGP config and the box knows what I'm talking about, but "network 192.0.2.0/24" is no good? If it doesn't do anything else, at least IPv6 will get rid of this problem. Iljitsch van Beijnum