On Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:19:31 -0800, David Josephson WA6NMF wa6nmf@josephson.com wrote:
I am puzzled that we want to assign 44-net addresses one by one as shown in amprhosts rather than as subnets. Perhaps there is a historical reason for that. The routing table could get to be very large (we can hope!)
I think the reason we started it that way was the sparse population of addresses and the fact we coordinators didn't initially know any better coupled with the geographical/topological distribution of IP nodes where we couldn't really count on a node being in any specific location within the net. Nodes had to determine their neighbors by discovery and they were routed manually.
I didn't start subnetting until users wanted blocks of IP addresses for specific purposes, like UHF vs VHF gateways, digipeaters, or ARES/RACES. I wrote a paper on it but I don't know how widely it was distributed or how well it was received.