On 03-Nov-21 10:58, Stewart Bryant wrote:
I believe that it was the 20 byte GOSIP address that made the 16 byte IPv6 address thinkable.
The address architecture was highly flexible and you could have used almost any length you wished, and the forwarders could support multiple address families concurrently.
Yes. (Hence RFC1888 section 5.) But in practice at that time, US GOSIP was the only game in town.
As Scott's citation suggests, the choice of a fixed length address field was contested. There was draft-rekhter-bigten-addr-arch-00 which went into more detail on variable length addresses (and acknowledged RFC1629).
Brian
