Perhaps worth noting (for the archives) that a significant part of the early ARPAnet was DECsystem-10's with 36-bit words. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email Tony Patti CIO S. Walter Packaging Corp. -----Original Message----- From: George Herbert [mailto:george.herbert@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 3:28 PM To: Tony Hain Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: IPv4 address length technical design On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Tony Hain <alh-ietf@tndh.net> wrote: It's worthwhile noting that the state of system (mini and microcomputer) art at the time of the 1977 discussions was, for example, the Intel 8085 (8-bit registers; the 16-bit 8086 was 1978) and 16-bit PDP-11s. The 32-bit VAX 11/780 postdated these (announced October 77). Yes, you can do 32 or 64 bit network addressing with smaller registers, but there are tendencies to not think that way.