When IP Addresses Were Tiny
Description
A black-and-white photo shows two people operating a room-sized 1970s-era computer with large cabinets, dials, panels, and a console desk. The top caption reads, "COMPUTERS IN 1970 BE LIKE," and the bottom caption reads, "YEAH MY IP IS 5," with a small "t.me/dev_meme" watermark at the lower left. The joke imagines early networked computers having absurdly short IP addresses because there were so few hosts compared with today's internet. Technically, it plays on the contrast between room-scale hardware and the historical scarcity of network endpoints before modern IP addressing, routing, and address exhaustion became everyday concerns.
Comments
1Comment deleted
Early networking had the only scalable architecture no vendor can sell today: almost no users.