> From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpen...@gmail.com>
> The design error was made in the late 1970s, when Louis Pouzin's advice
> that catenet addresses should be variable length, with a format prefix,
> was not taken during the design of IPv4.
Ironically, TCP/IP had variable length addresses put in _twice_, and they were
removed both times! (You can't make this stuff up! :-)
- TCPv1 (no separate TCP and IP at that point) had variable lenth addresses
of up to 15 4-bit nibbles
- TCP/IPv3 had variable lenth addresses of up to 15 8-bit bytes (but the
'network number' part was supposed to be only the first byte, exactly
like IPv4 in its early days)
This latter change happened shortly before I joined the project, otherwise no
doubt I would have strenously objected! :-)
Noel
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