On Sep 14, 2010, at 9:30 32PM, Barry Shein wrote:
On September 14, 2010 at 00:49 williams.bruce@gmail.com (Bruce Williams) wrote:
And what does this "appeal to the ancient wisdom" have to do with technology and business today anyway?
The article claimed that AT&T is claiming (to the FCC I think it was) that net non-neutrality was an early design goal of the internet, so they should be allowed to do whatever it is they want to do.
Well, of course it was, only big research sites got IMPs with real 56k connections. Little guys like Apple, e.g., had to live on X.25 links from CSNET. BU was hooked up for a while via a 9600bps "cypress" link (a Vax 11/725* later Sun3/50 imp-a-like, via a serial port.)
And we won't even talk about who got /8s. AT&T got 2 if I remember right though that company had no relationship to this AT&T which is just a rename of SBC after they bought some AT&T assets which owned the original trademark which is kind of like the old "if my grandmother had wheels they'd call her a trolley car" but I digress.
No, they bought AT&T, which had an ISP business, a long distance business, a private line business, and AT&T Labs, as well as other miscellaneous pieces like the brand name. We can wonder if AT&T would have survived as an independent company, but it was a going concern and not in bankruptcy at the time of the transaction. But yes, SBC is the controlling piece of the new AT&T. 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. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb *The early sequence number guessing attack tools required a dead host that would be impersonated by the attacker. By chance, one of the early tools used something in 12/8. I started announcing it from Murray Hill, to catch the back-scatter from the victims. We found some of that; we also found lots of folks who were using 12/8 themselves, probably internally.