[ih] When did "32" bits for IP register as "not enough"?

[internet-history at gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor)]

On 2/13/19 1:42 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> NAT for non-IP was around much earlier. DECnet "hidden areas" were a 
> form of NAT, and at CERN we NATted a home-built network in the early 
> 1980s since it had (iirc) 6-bit host addresses. It was that experience 
> that made me a NAT hater for evermore.

Were "hidden areas" really NAT?  I thought it was more a bastion host 
that you could connect to / pass through (above the network layer) to 
get to hosts in functionally private DECnet address space.

Could you cause DECnet packets / datagrams / frames / ??? coming in from 
one side to forward out the other side, like destination NAT / port 
forwarding?  Or was it only that DECnet nodes that knew about the 
re-used / hidden areas could get to them.  Could hosts on the outside 
have a route to the hidden area via the bastion?



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die