Sorry, fat-fingered something when I was trying to edit. On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Bill Stewart <nonobvious@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Steven Bellovin <smb@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.
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. 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. -- ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.