One thought on “Google IPv6 Conference 2008 (video)”

1. Peter E. Murray notes on his blog the following exchange between Vint Cerf & Bob Hinden during the panel.

   Vint Cerf

   Well, just speaking for myself — like I said earlier this morning — I believe that v6 is the only thing that we can do right now to make sure that address space is available and that we preserve as much as possible the end to end structure of the network.

   Bob Hinden

   Can I get one other comment in here? You reminded me of something. So back when Vint and everyone was starting the v4 — the current internet — was not a sure thing. Back, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And there were lots of –

   Vint Cerf

   I’m sorry, it’s 30 years ago because the decision — [laughter]. No, I’m serious, the decision to put a 32-bit address space on there was the result of a year’s battle among a bunch of engineers who couldn’t make up their minds about 32, 128 or variable length. And after a year of fighting I said — I’m now at ARPA, I’m running the program, I’m paying for this stuff and using American tax dollars — and I wanted some progress because we didn’t know if this is going to work. So I said 32 bits, it is enough for an experiment, it is 4.3 billion terminations — even the defense department doesn’t need 4.3 billion of anything and it couldn’t afford to buy 4.3 billion edge devices to do a test anyway. So at the time I thought we were doing a experiment to prove the technology and that if it worked we’d have an opportunity to do a production version of it. Well — [laughter] — it just escaped! — it got out and people started to use it and then it became a commercial thing. So, this [IPv6] is the production attempt at making the network scalable. Only 30 years later.

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