[CLUE-Tech] WAS: Netmask trivia question...

[David Anselmi]

black at galaxy.silvren.com wrote:
> I think what Perlman was referring to is that when IP was first conceived,
> addresses were all classful. VLSM didn't exist, and you could assume a
> netmask based on the host address.

Nonsense.  When IP was first conceived, with the network address 
self-encoded netmasks (much less VLSMs) did not exist at all.

[...]
> Interestingly that book was published in 1999, when a lot of people were
> still cutting their teeth trying to move from classful to classless
> addressing, and the IP address space shortage was all the rage.

Perlman was (IIRC) referring to RFC 950, Internet Standard Subnetting 
Procedures.  This was written in 1985 and has an example of a 
non-contiguous netmask.

Dave