[ih] Origin of the loopback interface

[brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)]

Hi,

Over on ipv6 at ietf.org we're discussing the issue of how to assign an address to a node without assigning it to a specific physical or tunnel interface. This is a minor gap in the IPv6 addressing architecture spec, but it creates a terminology issue in various other places.

The thread started with the following message, and has got surprisingly long:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipv6/U0QzAWpZTypF8gyZZ8HPfXZLOPM

So the question came up of when and where the term 'loopback interface' arose. Does anybody here have an answer for that?

Regards
   Brian Carpenter