Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers?
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Every land-line phone I’ve had didn’t carry it’s number with it. The number is assigned to a fixed, immovable address. Back then it was part of a physical switching system - in the switching center, shafts would move up and down and rotate to connect one circuit to another. These were circuit-switched networks.
The only number that’s static on my cell phone is the EID, because it’s necessary with a mobile device connecting to a radio-based network. The system needs to know how to route a connection whenever the phone moves - “which tower is it on” - which is handled by the device registering with the tower, the network then updates it’s database. The phone number with a cell phone is specifically for routing user connections (essentially tells the system what subscriber is associated with a given endpoint - your phone).
None of is is required for internet connections, as you get connectivity via a router which is the Internet-facing address for other devices to see. Things were established this way initially because there’s no need for an endpoint device to be directly exposed (plus hardware and software capabilities at the time).
Also, I hope to never see the day when all consumer endpoint devices are directly on the internet. That’s a bad idea in so many ways (and why I argue IPv6 is generally useless for endpoint consumer devices). IP6 is great for plenty of other reasons.
jeffhykin@lemm.ee 6 months ago
If I were an engineer in the past, trying to send a message back to an endpoint (e.g. a server response) I would’ve reached for everything having a static IP, same as the EID system with phones, instead of the DHCP multi-tier NAT type system with temp addresses.
I’m all but certain they didnt do it for privacy reasons at the time.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Well, endpoints then were largely mainframe type systems, long before PCs existed, let alone network-capable PCs and http. So it was a different idea than what we have today.
Before internet, you could connect two physically disparate systems using point-to-point, permanently switched connections (so it always consumed a potential connection even when no data was being transmitted). If you had Point A connected to Point B, you need a third connection to comm with Point C. The idea was, if B already had a connection to C, why not share that bandwidth/connection so A only needed one connection? And then apply a data-switching concept (e.g. Packet switching), instead of circuit-switching.
We were still using P-to-P connections in the late 90’s because internet capabilites weren’t quite up to what some systems needed for latency, timing, and bandwidth.
At first, just getting two endpoint mainframes connected was a big deal, and individual user devices wasn’t much of a thought, yet. Most stuff was still mainframe based, so having those connected was sufficient for user communication/data sharing anyway. Since user connectivity wasn’t the main concern - moving data from one system to another was, say an entity has 2 locations, and needs to sync the systems in those two locations. So you either use a circuit-switched P-to-P, with downtime for users when sync is happening, or send physical tapes (magnetic or even pinched paper tapes) cross-country to move data, with that data being out-of-sync and requiring manual updates to re-sync.
Routing was necessary primarily for backbone transit, secondarily for organizations with multiple systems, hence the IP Classful approach.
DHCP is a local network requirement - ask any Admin about static IP addresses - that’s a nightmare. I don’t even like it at home with a handful of devices.
NAT is a result of the limited IP address space, not DHCP - there’s simply not enough addresses in 32bits for every local device to have a public IP (nor would you want this), plus having multiple services behind a router using local addressing. Even with static local addresses, you’d need NAT.
Also, look at the time - if you had a LAN in the late 80’s, it was something like Banyan Vines or Netware IPX (neither of which was routable originally), for local comms between local systems. Any internet/external network requirements were for (again) moving data between disparate locations. The idea that a workstation needed specific internet/non-local access to (what?) really didn’t make sense. It would comm with a local data source (mainframe/IBM 360, etc), and that system would manage retrieving or syncing data from elsewhere. A workstation was largely a dumb terminal before PCs (other than actual “workstations” which is a different animal".