On 04/02/2010 06:38 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
I understand that they were A classes and assigned to large companies, etc. but was it just not believed there would be more than 126(-ish) of these entities at the time? Or was it thought we would move on to larger address space before we did? Or was it that things were just more free-flowing back in the day? Why were A classes even created? RFC 791 at least doesn't seem to provide much insight as to the 'whys'.
/8's were not given out to large companies. They were given out to *everyone*! In the beginning there was the ARPANET and it was considered a large network (it was certainly an expensive network!). The notion was that there would only be a small number of "large" networks, so 8 bits was enough to enumerate them. The original IP plan didn't have classes of networks at all. It was 8 bits of network and 24 bits of host-on-that-network. It was only after network numbers started to hit the early thirties that folks realized that there needed to be more networks and the "class-full" approach was invented. So most of the existing class A holders just happened to be the very early adopters (actually the original research and government organizations that were connected to the network). -Jeff -- ======================================================================== Jeffrey I. Schiller MIT Network Manager/Security Architect PCI Compliance Officer Information Services and Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Room W92-190 Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 617.253.0161 - Voice jis@mit.edu http://jis.qyv.name ========================================================================