In your previous mail you wrote:
I'm not trying to solve a problem. I'm seeking to understand why a thing
is the way it is.
=> there are two parts:
- why was it accepted? As I was involved in IPv6 design at that stage
I can answer:
* the proposal looked sane (i.e., it did what we wanted)
* collisions were rare and not annoying (needs 4096 (2^(24/2)) nodes
to get .5 probability)
* fits well to Ethernet (which was the far most common shared link at
this time, and perhaps even more common today :-)
* 8 bit boundary, i.e., clearly straightforward to implement
* no other proposal (IMHO the main point! :-)
so nobody raised a concern and it reached rough consensus in one step.
- what is exactly the idea behind the design?
You should try to find the author of the initial I-D, wish (s)he is not
dead or retired, or perhaps switch to the ih (Internet History) mailing
list (perhaps too soon for IPv6 but BTW your question is not really
technical, is it?).
Thanks
[email protected]
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