Vint Cerf on mistakes he made in TCP/IP
Cerf: &quot;I&#x27;m serious, the decision to put a 32-bit address space on there was the result of a year&#x27;s battle among a bunch of engineers who couldn&#x27;t make up their minds about 32, 128 or variable length. And after a year of fighting I said -- I&#x27;m now at ARPA, I&#x27;m running the program, I&#x27;m paying for this stuff and using American tax dollars -- and I wanted some progress because we didn&#x27;t know if this is going to work. So I said 32 bits, it is enough for an experiment, it is 4.3 billion terminations -- even the defense department doesn&#x27;t need 4.3 billion of anything and it couldn&#x27;t afford to buy 4.3 billion edge devices to do a test anyway. So at the time I thought we were doing a experiment to prove the technology and that if it worked we&#x27;d have an opportunity to do a production version of it. Well -- [laughter] -- it just escaped! -- it got out and people started to use it and then it became a commercial thing. So, this [IPv6] is the production attempt at making the network scalable. Only 30 years later.&quot;<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mZo69JQoLb8?t=815" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mZo69JQoLb8?t=815</a> &quot;Google IPv6 Conference 2008: What will the IPv6 Internet look like?&quot;