[tlug] Re: IPv6

["Jim Breen" <jimbreen@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> thoughtlessly dashed off:

> The amazing thing about the Internet is not that it works, but that it
> mostly works by design.

However, compared to the traditional ways of building up network
technologies and standards, the standout thing about the Internet
is that it was "design lite". With the good old ISO/CCITT/etc. approach
committees would have met for years and voluminous standards produced
with more options than you could count before anything much was built.
Many of the standards ended up like lumbering multiply-humped camels
as a result. The Internet with its early RFC system was quite anarchic
by comparison, with a striving for utter simplicity. Hence the "S" in
protocols like SMTP and SNMP. It became a bit more ordered as the IETF
processes began to bite, but you saw with things like IP-NG a virtual
public bakeoff between a number of different proposals.

All in all, it represented a huge paradigm shift in terms of building
something large and complex.

> And this from a government project! (^-)

Only by the loosest application of the term. To its credit, the US
DoD and DARPA, having funded the beginnings, really stepped back. It was
initially a network by boffins for boffins. Much of the US government money
that drove the expansion in the late 80s was via the NSF once it had been
proven to work.

-- 
Jim Breen
Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Clayton School of Information Technology,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/