From the time we began to take the idea of an address runout seriously in the early 90s to the actual address runout which would be just about now new priorities arose such as spam which I'll say really got going in the late 90s.
There were others such as the potential routing table explosion which no doubt got passing notice from the start but I think it's safe to say has been looming more and more as a potential big problem in recent years. And security & privacy which perhaps something like an IPv6 couldn't much solve, most of that is higher in the stack, but then again maybe not. Didn't OSI have some sort of L2 credentials passing? That's all difficult to debate if for no other reason than one says "security" and several different definitions and priorities pop into people's heads ranging from low-level issues such as ddos and spoofing and simple sniff and MITM avoidance to what it might mean to a bank security officer or credit card undewriter or an individual at risk. And spam and phishing and all that. Oh and toss intellectual property rights management on the fire because it casts such a lovely glow. This has been a moving target and a canvas on which to paint each now and evolving challenge of a technology which has grown into ubiquity. Around 1992 when IPv6 was just picking up steam the net engineering community was pretty happy if an email got delivered in well under a minute and an FTP went smoothly. Words like congestion and route flapping could take up entire career paths. I think we need to stop replaying history like what if there weren't a Russian winter and just press forward. -- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*