Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kstrauser 778 days ago
And by that analogy, the previous BIOS version was released in 1981, and modern networking is hamstrung by its design which assumed "4 billion addresses ought to be enough for anybody" and that it needed to be manageable by an 8-bit OS with 64KB of RAM.

IPv4 is a brilliant protocol for having been published 43 years ago. There aren't a whole lot of technologies that old still widely used. I mean, I'm glad my NVMe drive doesn't have to shove bits through an ST412 interface.

2 comments

While I had an "ST412 reference" on my bingo card yesterday morning, sadly I do not have it today. Opportunity lost.
> And by that analogy, the previous BIOS version was released in 1981, and modern networking is hamstrung by its design which assumed "4 billion addresses ought to be enough for anybody" and that it needed to be manageable by an 8-bit OS with 64KB of RAM.

I'm not sure if it makes the analogy better or worse, but this is what happened; BIOS was born in ~1981 (I think), had severe shortcomings that were partially mitigated over time but you can only mitigate so much, UEFI is a better replacement, BIOS->UEFI was a somewhat rocky migration, that migration was made worse by extra stuff getting bundled in (secure boot), and this led to a significant chunk of the population deliberately avoiding it at least for a while. The only real difference is that UEFI has long since become standard, while IPv6 is still fighting for adoption.

Fighting for adoption? The majority of Internet traffic is now IPv6 and we're almost starting to see eyeball networks without any IPv4 at all, so I hope your boss is aware you're blocking potential customers from visiting your website.