On Sep 14, 2010, at 9:30 32PM, Barry Shein wrote: > > On September 14, 2010 at 00:49 williams.br...@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.