All 4.3 billion IP addresses created in 1981 will be gone by summer

[Redondo]

All 4.3 billion IP addresses created in 1981 will be gone by summer

 

Engineers who created 4.3 billion Internet Protocol addresses back in 1981 probably thought that by the time we ran through all those, we'd be puttering around in flying cars.

 

Flying cars are going to be a while, but it looks like our IP numbers are finally up: The American Registry for Internet Numbers, the group that hands out the numerical codes, says there are only 3.4 million IPv4 addresses left, and the group's president says the supply will probably dry up by summer, the Wall Street Journal reports.

 

Major companies like Amazon and Microsoft are scooping up remaining addresses while they can, while others such as Facebook decided to bite the bullet and simply upgrade to the newer IPv6 system (IPv5 never really took hold).

 

[TobiasFunke]

So you're telling me Angelssuck.com is probably already taken?

[mrwicked]

Yeah the IPv4 address space is pretty small.

Who'd have known we would need all 2^32 values (4 billionish) back when they came up with it in the 1980s?

IPv6 is mainly just a bigger address space, it's massive, 2^128 (which is really a f*ck ton, 3.4 * 10^38 addresses, more than the number of molecules in the universe).

All those damn zack morris phones need an address bruh.

Edited May 19, 2015 by mrwicked

[red321]

At some point you would think the IT folks would understand not to box themselves in.

[Vegas Halo Fan]

Reminds me of the Y2K catastrophe that wasn't.

[Guest]

Reminds me of the Y2K catastrophe that wasn't.

 

Only difference is it at the time it was a lot less reasonable to assume the calendar year would fail to reach 2000 than it was to assume that 4Billion IP addresses would be sufficient to last well beyond the original programmers' lifetime.

 

Also, I'm a bit disappointed that nobody has posted this yet:

 

Edited May 29, 2015 by ScottLux