End of an era: IPv4 – goodbye, IPv6 – hello!
What has been the talk of the internet community for so long has finally happened. February 3, 2011, will go down in the history of the global IT industry as the beginning of the end. On that day, in accordance with the RIPE-436 document, the Internet Assignment Authority (IANA), the number allocation organization, released the last five /8 IP address blocks for distribution to regional internet registries (RIRs) to consumers.
The RIPE NCC, which has acquired the 185/8 address module, will begin distributing them immediately upon exhaustion of its own IPv4 address space reserve. Thus, the IPv4 era has come to an end. All subsequent allocations will be made exclusively in accordance with the IPv6 protocol.
Be that as it may, it's probably worth looking back a bit into history. The foundations of the modern internet were laid by American scientist Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990) in 1962, becoming one of the creators of the ARPANET, the prototype of the modern internet. The next step the American military took toward the internet was a phone call from the US Department of Defense on March 26, 1972, to ARPANET administrators Vint Cerf and Jon Postel. They were required to create a special directory of network nodes, which they did in December 1972. Postel also recommended assigning ports to network services and henceforth calling the network administrator the "king of the entire internet" (czar).
He appointed himself as Tsar, and the IANA governing body ascended to the throne in 1990. His Majesty died in October 1998. Joyce Reynolds became the new Internet Czar, transferring IANA's functions to ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names. IANA had been funded by the US government since 1988. On January 1, 1999, all IANA functions were finally transferred to ICANN. On February 8, 2000, the US Government Department of Commerce ratified this merger. In 2003, Doug Barton was appointed Internet Czar. He was succeeded by David Conrad in 2005. In 2010, Elise Gerich became the first Internet Czar.
In May 1974, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) accepted for publication a paper by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Communications over Networks." This was the TCP protocol. It was later split into TCP proper and the Internet Protocol (IP). Veterans of the Ukrainian internet remember this wonderful term "TCP/IP." This protocol was officially named IPv4 according to RFC 791 in 1981. Previous versions of the protocol, developed between 1977 and 1979, were not further developed, but this one turned out to be quite viable. IPv4 was initially limited to 4 billion addresses due to the 32-bit nature of the protocol itself. Bill Gates had not yet had time to utter his famous words, "640 kilobytes is enough memory for a personal computer."
The developers of IPv4 also considered more than 4 billion internet addresses unrealistic. Version 5 was assigned to the failed Internet Stream Protocol. Versions 6, 7, 8, and 9 were assigned to the then-experimental protocols SIPP (Simple Internet Protocol Plus), TP/IX, PIP, and TUBA. SIPP won the Darwinian battle of IPv4 successors and received its current name, IPv6. And now it's its turn to rule the world's electronic communications.
Protocol is dead! Long live protocol!
