On 9/14/21 12:44 AM, Eliot Lear wrote:
There were four proposals for the IPng:
* NIMROD, PIP, SIP, and TUBA
SIP was the one that was chosen, supported by endpoint manufacturers
such as Sun and SGI, and it was the MOST compatible. Operators and
router manufacturers at the time pushed TUBA, which was considerably
less compatible with the concepts used in v4 because of variable
length addressing. If we endpoints had some notion that v6 would
take as long as it has to diffuse, perhaps we all might have thought
differently. I don't know.
So I'm beginning to think that the reason ipv6 didn't take off is one
simple thing: time. All of the infighting took years and by then that
ship had long sailed. The basic mechanisms for v6 for hosts were not
complicated and all of the second system syndrome fluff could be mostly
be ignored or implemented when it actually made sense. If this had been
settled within a year instead of five, there may have been a chance
especially since specialized hardware was either nonexistent or just
coming on the scene. I mean, Kalpana was still pretty new when a lot of
this was being first discussed from what I can tell. Maybe somebody else
knows when hardware routing came on the scene but there was still lots
of software forwarding planes when I started at Cisco in 1998 just as
broadband was starting to flow.
The IETF was a victim of its own dysfunction, film at 11 and now we're
having a 30 year reunion.
Mike
