Back in the late 50’s and early 60’s, the United States was trying to regain its position as a leader in technology. Fostered by the launch of Sputnik 2 in 1958, many of the great minds of the US (especially those of the military) speculated upon the creation of a disaster-proof network that would allow global/domestic communications to continue uninterrupted during periods of war and unrest. (Well, that plan hasn’t been 100% successful as some Islamic nations can attest, but hey, it was America’s idea.) It wasn’t even a year after Russian’s spectacular breakthrough - launching a three-year-old mongrel canine into Space - which the US reciprocated with its own technological brew. The organization ARPA was formed out of a need to prove to other nations that the US Military, in particular, had more sophisticated technology and wouldn’t succumb to the technical advantages of its enemies. The objective: creation of a fault-tolerant communications grid that would continue unabated during wartime. ARPA achieved that goal, and incidentally, implemented many of the guidelines and usage policies that govern the World Wide Web to this day.

Arpa > Darpa >ARPA... DARPA!

Advanced Research Projects Agency, then later renamed to DARPA (that’s the Dept. of Defense’s version), then renamed back to ARPA in ’93, and finally back to DARPA in ’96, spawned and funded the development of an autonomous (self-governing) network numbering system to allow this fail-proof communications network to exist. The technology caught on, and served its purpose. However, the technology began to pique the interest of many other outside entities, beyond the Dept. of Defense’s own applications. State universities, public libraries, and then certain private organizations began to explore the technology as a way for their own organization(s) to create their own fault tolerant communications infrastructure. A separate organization, IANA, then run by a single network administrator, Jon Postel, is credited with creating a czar to administer and govern the usage of the various services that would be transmitted through this communication grid – HTML being one example of such service.

IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, was formed in 1972 out of necessity to allow multiple Dept. of Defense agencies to have unique addresses for their computers connected to the “then” Internet. The early phase of Internet Protocol (IP) address was implemented to create a form of security for each element of this interconnected network. Before IP addresses became commonplace, a single address was assigned to each entity to distinguish itself from another – this would eventually prove just as useful as assigning a single postal address to an entire city block. The commonly used IPv4 (that’s version 4) address was eventually created to provide slightly more than four billion usable IP addresses, enabling a unique IP address for each connected device. A device had many definitions: your PC, the company’s servers, or any technology that had a need to communicate with another device for whatever purpose. At the time, some of us in the IT field joked that this was more than sufficient and that by the turn of the century, our refrigerators would have their own IP addresses, giving them the ability to send a grocery list directly to the food store when you’re milk and Ghirardelli chocolate supply was running low. I guess that vision didn’t take off as expected.

The Internet as YOU know it.

The first known “public Internet” was tunneled through online carriers in the beginning – AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy being the largest providers. Internet technology continued to improve during the mid 90’s, opening the door for the general public to be able to connect directly to the Internet. Internet service providers began to quickly dot the global map providing more methods to send Instant Messages to one another. (For the old tech buff’s, these were the IRC and ICQ messaging networks, AOL and MSN then jumped onto the bandwagon.) HTML was gaining popularity, dynamic web content was emerging, and the Internet continued to burst in popularity. When I began to first explore the public Internet (in 1994), Fortune 500 companies were starting to tinker with online content. Marketing and online sales campaigns followed. More users, more entities – a dwindling set of available IP addresses. As early as 1995 the Internet registries realized that in the not-so-distant future the number of available IP addresses would be depleted. The Internet task force (IETF) designed the IPv6 specification in 1995 to support the rapidly growing Internet. As with any other technology, they seemed to drop a new bomb on us just as we finished cleaning up from the implementation of the previous version. (No hints needed there.) Granted, IPv6 was introduced nearly 16 yrs ago, yet it has only been in the last few years that the migration from IPv4 was taken seriously. The time is drawing close for the depletion of IPv4 addresses – and the last 5 “/8” IP address blocks will be dealt to the 5 global Internet “czars” in a matter of months.

A “Louisiana Purchase,” in technological terms

In the beginning, IP address blocks were allocated in large quantities, and often with little or no required documentation to justify the use of such a large number of IPv4 addresses. As the crisis of IP address depletion became a hot topic, so did the portions of the IP blocks being delegated to the ISP’s (Internet Service Providers). A /8 block refers to approximately 16.8 million IP addresses. There are a total of 255 /8 blocks, however, private use of several of these blocks limits public availability. Newly formed ISP’s will start to acquire only fragments of these blocks; Internet providers and their clients will need to devise new methods of using their IP addresses more efficiently. Internet equipment providers will soon provide the means necessary to allocate a single IP address for many types of services, and websites. Today, a single IP address can be assigned to several hundred websites by utilizing a method called “host headers.” (A method of IP address allocation similar to how condos and apartment buildings use sub-addresses to designate several unit numbers for a single street address.) Although this practice has been in use for almost a decade, the adoption rate is slower than the IP address bloat. Being months away from the final depletion of the IP address blocks, it would seem there would be a sense of urgency to condense the usage of IP addresses in use today. NOT likely. The successor to IPv4 provides approximately 3.4×1038 available IP addresses. Compared to the 6.8 billion people on this Earth as of 2010, that works out to approximately 5x1028 addresses per PERSON. Not that the intention was to have this mass allocation with the adoption of IPv6, it would allow for a smoother geographical dispersion of IP blocks globally. As of late 2010, only 25-29% of the global Internet users/entities have adopted IPv6 usage. Not as elusive as the Y2K bug evidenced by two digit dates programmed into older computing systems, the depletion of IPv4 addresses will not likely cause planes to fall from the sky. Unfortunately, my refrigerator is just going to have to wait to make that call to the grocery store.