Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

For that matter, /8 blocks were given out, if not quite like candy, certainly with considerable abandon. A fair number of the early universities and companies who registered ended up with complete /8 blocks all to themselves.

[EDIT: Duh. Of course, it was actually Class A blocks at the time.]

View on HN

Just to nitpick, this was before CIDR, so you're probably referring to Class A blocks, of which there were only 125 (the first octet being 1-9,11-126).

Class C's were literally given out like candy. I have my own /24, and know several others who do, as well.

> Class C's were literally given out like candy.

Are you implying that they were printed out, individually packaged, and offered in a bowl?

Totally. ;) In all seriousness, I had friends who emailed Internic with fake company names and their home address. They received a Class C allocation in about a month.

https://xkcd.com/195/

Maybe a little out of date by now, but still, you can get a feel for it.

Apple, Ford, HP, DEC, Xerox, among others all have full /8 blocks.

Halliburton had 34.* and 134.132.* as of 2015 when I last worked there, but I looked a few months ago and they've sold off some of that /8 to Amazon and others.... A lot of places with /8s are fixing their wasteful allocations and making good money off of it.

Yep, MIT also sold off, as I recall, about half of their Class A to Amazon a while back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com