[arin-ppml] Proposal - Remove Initial Small Assignment Requirements for IPv6

[Owen DeLong]

> On Sep 14, 2021, at 00:54 , hostmaster at uneedus.com wrote:
> 
> When NCP was changed to TCP in a hot cut, no one even considered that maybe that would have been a good time to increase the number of bits in IPv4 addresses.  Because that was a hot cut, that would have been the perfect time to do this, but of course this would have increased the work load to do so, since every piece of network software assumed 32 bits at this time and would have had to be updated and recompiled.  At this time, the number of nodes was under 1k and a billion addresses seemed like it would never run out.  If we slid that to say 64 bits at that time, I doubt that IPv6 (IPng) project would have ever been started.  But it did not, and we still are stuck with a 32 bit IPv4 address.

It wasn’t a hot cut… That’s revisionist history.

There was a drop-dead date set when the backbone routers would stop forwarding NCP, but NCP and IP ran in parallel on those routers for some time prior to the drop-dead date.

Dual stack was, in fact, the successful model used to transition NCP to IP. The success vs. IPv6 was due to 3 factors:

1.	Community spirit of the community running the NCP internet at the time. (as opposed to modern every man for himself attitudes)
2.	Relatively small number of participants that needed to cooperate in the process.
3.	Agreement on a drop-dead date after which NCP would stop functioning in the backbone.

By the time real efforts to deploy IPv6 were underway, all three of those conditions had become false for IP.

Owen