Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!MERIT.EDU!hwb
From: hwb@MERIT.EDU (Hans-Werner Braun)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Mourning of the passing of the ARPANET
Message-ID: <9006141556.AA15927@crystal-cave.merit.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 90 15:56:12 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18


>Oh, come now. Nobody's big enough to need a class A network. Entities
>that have class A networks now didn't get them because they've got big
>networks; they got them for political reasons. MIT and Stanford were
>big with DARPA. MERIT runs NSFNET. It'll be a long, long time before
>anyone with a class A net manages to accumulate sixteen million hosts.

Your comment is misleading. Merit had a class A network number long
before we had to do with NSFNET. The NSFNET backbone itself uses a Class B
network number. The reason why Merit has a network number was exclusively
on grounds of mapping addresses to the probably 200 or so packet switching
nodes that Merit had in that state of Michigan at that time (now much
more than 200). Potentially all those nodes map to what Merit calls
"hosts" and those (several different) hosts can map to many "ports."
Took Jon Postel and me quite a while to "fight" this out at that time.
It was not possible to fit this into a Class B space.
	
	-- Hans-Werner