My own answer is “I don’t know”.\u00a0 I only know that there were a few of us thinking about the problem in 1989.\u00a0 Roy Smith raised the issue on the TCP-IP mailing list on November 25th of that year with this message:<\/p>\n
Date: 25 Nov 88 14:56:57 GMT\r\nFrom: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)\r\nTo: comp.protocols.tcp-ip\r\nSubject: Running out of Internet addresses?<\/pre>\n\tHas anybody made any serious estimates of how long it will be\r\nbefore we run out of 32-bit IP addresses? (Silly question; I'm sure a very\r\ngreat amount of thought has been given to it by many people.) With the\r\nproliferation of such things as diskless workstations, each of which has\r\nits own IP address (not to mention terminal multiplexors which eat up one\r\nIP address per tty line!), it seems like it won't be too long before we\r\njust plain run out of addresses.\r\n\r\n\tYes, I know that 2^32 is a hell of a big number, but it seems like\r\nwe won't get anywhere near that number of assigned addresses before we\r\neffectively run out because most nets are sparsely populated. My little\r\nbit of wire, for example, has 256 allocated addresses yet I'm only actually\r\nusing 30 or so.\r\n-- \r\nRoy Smith, System Administrator\r\nPublic Health Research Institute\r\n{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net\r\n\"The connector is the network\"<\/pre>\nBack then we used IP addresses in a considerably sparser way than we do today.\u00a0 That message kicked off a lengthy discussion in which nobody seriously was in denial about the potential for a problem.\u00a0 You can find the whole archive of the exchange here<\/a>.\u00a0 There were two concepts that were touched upon.\u00a0 The first was whether or not we could use the so-called “Class E” space (240.0.0.0\/4).\u00a0 I and others gave this serious thought at the time.\u00a0 However, the related issue which won the day was that fixed address lengths were an important property to be maintained.\u00a0 Vint Cerf raised that design consideration as a question.\u00a0 He also raised the possibility of using variable-length OSI addresses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My own answer is “I don’t know”.\u00a0 I only know that there were a few of us thinking about the problem in 1989.\u00a0 Roy Smith raised the issue on the TCP-IP mailing list on November 25th of that year with this message: Date: 25 Nov 88 14:56:57 GMT From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) To: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: … Continue reading “IPv4 address shortage: Who was the first to become concerned?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[205,54,55,411],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","tag-history","tag-ipv4","tag-ipv6","tag-shortage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1315,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions\/1315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}