Re: IP network address assignments/allocations information?

[Keith Moore]

> 1) If we effectively ran out of addresses when RFC 1597 was published, 
> has running out of addresses hurt us in any way? 

absolutely.  partially as a result of (perceived or actual) address scarcity,
people have deployed NATs everywhere, and this has had an large adverse
effect on the Internet's ability to support certain types of applications - 
particularly distributed applications (multi-party conferencing, games,
simulations, distributed computations) and applications where the "user"
end needs to be able to accept incoming traffic which is initiated
from "outside".  NATs also impair the reliability of the network because 
they can discard address mappings for connections that are still being 
used by applications.

Keith