Invisible wrote:
> And, for the 17th time, you *are* aware that I'm talking about earlier 
> _computer_ network technologies, right?

And what makes you think ISDN isn't a computer network technology?

 From the very first sentence in the wikipedia page you claimed was too complex:

"""
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a set of communications 
standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and 
other network services over the traditional circuits of the public switched 
telephone network.
"""

What do you think "Integrated Services" means?

> My point, which you seem determined to ignore, is that everybody who 
> designed a way to connect computers together designed it to only handle 
> a small handful of computers.

Uh, no.  How many computers do you think ISDN can connect together?

Or perhaps you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25

 > It seems to me that it wasn't until IP
> came along that you could connect very large collections of computers 
> together.

You are mistaken. People were connecting together large numbers of computers 
long before IP was around.

> I'm fairly sure the telephone network connects vastly fewer nodes. 

You are incorrect. Indeed, in 1999, there was more *fax* traffic than 
internet traffic, let alone voice and data. Ten years later, probably less 
so. But you're talking about "earlier" networks.

Just the number of telephones exceeded the number of IP addresses just a 
couple of years ago. And that's not even counting the fact that IP allocates 
multiple IP addresses to each router in the network and the PSTN doesn't 
allocate phone numbers to the switches at all. If you actually allocated an 
address to every endpoint like you do in IP, you'd have an order of 
magnitude more addresses in the PSTN than you do in IP.

 > It was also originally analogue, not digital.

Yes, but irrelevant once you invent the modem. All underlying network 
technology is analog until it gets to a modem.

> Not to mention being managed 
> by a very small number of companies. 

Not particularly. Certainly not nowadays.

>> And they're running out of addresses (actually, probably already ran 
>> out of addresses) long before every person has an address, let alone 
>> every piece of communications equipment.
> 
> Isn't that why IPv6 was invented?

In part.

> BTW, how come nobody uses that yet? 

Because they stupidly didn't design in any backward compatibility, so an 
IPv4 machine can't talk to an IPv6 machine and vice versa.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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