Cluster Addressing and CIDR

["J. Noel Chiappa" <[e-mail]>]

I was reading a paper by Paul Francis and Ramakrishna Gummadi, and a
reference caused me to re-read an interesting-sounding old paper they
referenced (RFC-1380, "IESG Deliberations on Routing and Addressing") to
refresh my memory of it, and further to read similar documents it referenced
(e.g. RFC-1287, "Towards the Future Internet Architecture").

In so doing, I was upset to see that the references included no mention of
the work of Carl-Herbert Rokitansky, whose "cluster addressing" scheme was
the first case I can recall of someone proposing to group a number of IP
network numbers together, and treat them as a single entity - the idea which
later became the key concept behind CIDR.

Granted, the original cluster addressing scheme had a different goal entirely
(it had to do with getting routing to work correctly with multiple X.25
networks) - but still, it put the thought of that mechanism in the heads of
everyone who was around at the time.

So, if anyone writes about CIDR in the future, can they please include a
reference to the cluster addressing work? Thanks.

	Noel