I tweeted about this earlier and thought it would be postworthy, albeit filed under trivia.
IPv6 is something we’re hearing a lot about at present, most of the latest Microsoft products are v6-ready (Windows itself has been via a downloadable pack for several years pre-dating Vista in fact) but very few organisations if any are doing anything with it.
I’ll post a little on the basics of v6 and my implementations fairly soon but the subject of the tweet which made me think about this was someone commenting about IPv5, or the lack thereof. Having a read around the web there’s clearly a mixture of opinion ranging from those who believe the version incremented by two to others who heard of a v5 but that it was only ever experimental.
It will come as a suprise to some that there was indeed an IPv5 and more importantly that it saw real-world implementation. Starting out as ‘ST’ a stream protocol for the transmission of “multidestination simplex data streams with QoS” (quality of service) and although the rfc 1819 here shows it as experimental and not a recognised standard several companies including Sun, NeXT and IBM implemented for real in the form of ST2, a refined version of the original.
