RE: NAT in the original Internet (RE: [wg-b] RE: [wg-c] IAB Technical Comment on the Unique)

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

> Harald Tveit Alvestrand
> Sent: Sunday, December 19, 1999 3:16 PM
>
> At 10:16 19.12.99 -0800, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:

> >Taste issues aside, NAT was part of the
> >original design concept behind the Internet, where local
> networks were only
> >assigned a few public IP addresses and the remainder were
> internal-only
> >addresses. Public IP addresses were only to be assigned to
> gateway and
> >front-porch systems. NAT is only the enablement of this,
> already extant,
> >concept.
>
> Hmm.....I'd like a reference (and date) for which "original
> design concept
> behind the Internet" NATs were a part of.
> The Internet grew from a number of ideas, including the
> famous "catenet",
> but I think that at the time of the Great Changeover (ARPANet
> turned off
> NCP and turned on TCP/IP, all in one night - Jan 1, 1983),
> the idea that
> all end-nodes had globally unique addresses was a fairly well
> established
> part of Internet "orthodoxy".
> Always willing to learn...

Okay, this places me in a bind <sigh> All my research records and
documentation, prior to Sep89, are in boxes, held hostage by my ex-wife ...
still! Ergo, most of this is directly from memory.

In 1983, I was working at Retix, Santa Monica, building ISO protocol stacks
and ethernet hardware (2 Mbps NICs). There were two outstanding issues
preventing completion/finalization of the ISO protocols and they were very
late. DOD became very impatient and decided to go with TCP/IP, as an interim
measure, until the ISO got its act together (ISO bickering was a LOT like
what the DNS warz sound like now <grin> [Note: within one year of TCP/IP
implementation, the ISO "magically" came to agreement and finalized the
spec, funny how that happened<grin>]).

However, there were a number of nets already extant. The Internet was
supposed to be the glue that bound them all together (therefore, the "inter"
in "internet" ). One of them was the French national network, which Retix
was working on, with Olivetti, at the time. There were many others,
including the uucp network, various IBM SNA networks, ARCnet, Netware
systems, CompuServ, Time<something-or-other>, et al. All of them had
different addressing schemes. The gateways for all of these required a form
of NAT to work. This is the basis of my statement. Interfacing to foriegn
networks was the norm, at that time, and an intrinsic capability of the
Internet.