[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Louis Mamakos <louie at transsys.com>

    > For a while, the generalized subnet architecture "supported"
    > non-continguous subnet masks to distinguish the network part from the
    > host part. I don't know what the driver for this was.

Pure serendipity. The basic mechanism used (the bit-mask) allowed
non-continguous masks as a natural consequence of the mechanism; we would
have had to specifically disallow them, and we didn't bother to. I seem to
recall we thought we'd leave them in, and see if people found some good use
for them.

	Noel