Steven Bellovin wrote: > > Randy Bush wrote: >> >> whatever the number of address bits, if it is fixed, we always run out. >> memory addressing has been a cliff many times. ip addressing. ... > > Yup. To quote Fred Brooks on memory address space: "Every successful > computer architecture eventually runs out of address space" -- and I heard > him say that in 1973. I'm wondering what resource shortage would have happened if IPv6 had been massively adopted 10 years earlier, and whether we would have seen the internet backbone routers suffer severely from the size of the routing tables, if every single home customer (DSL subscriber) would have required a provider-independent IPv6 network prefix rather than a single, provider-dependent IPv4 IP Address. -Martin