[ncc-services-wg] Policy proposal for services to legacy Internet resource holders

On 28 Aug 2012, at 17:42, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

> DDN.MIL NIC would tend to disagree with your statement (similar  
> emails were sent back in the "old" days to most NRENs since we were  
> the Internet pioneers)

Hank, that may well be have been true for you. As your email shows.

However my version of this truth is even older and very different from  
yours. The Class B I arranged for my university in the late 1980s was  
never, ever anything to do with the NREN of that era. This was true  
for all the UK universities who dabbled in TCP/IP back then. At that  
time, the NREN was downright hostile to this TCP/IP heresy and we were  
supposed to only use X.25 based protocols until the transition to OSI  
was completed. CompSci departments could do TCP/IP over their own  
ethernets but this was *forbidden* on the WAN (and in some cases, the  
campus LAN too). Sometimes, it was the Internet pioneers in CompSci or  
EE departments who got the space from SRI, not even the university  
itself. Anyone interested in this ancient history can take a look at http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof7/Reid-History.pdf

So the upshot of all this is there's no "one size fits all" answer. In  
some cases ERX space will have been doled out by the NREN. In others,  
it won't.