Where are you getting the "19 ivory tower academics and 1 guy from Bell Labs" from?

Per [0][1] it was:

> The working-group members were J. Allard (Microsoft), Steve Bellovin (AT&T), Jim Bound (Digital Equipment Corporation), Ross Callon (Wellfleet), Brian Carpenter (CERN), Dave Clark (MIT), John Curran (NEARNET), Steve Deering (Xerox), Dino Farinacci (Cisco), Paul Francis (NTT), Eric Fleischmann (Boeing), Mark Knopper (Ameritech), Greg Minshall (Novell), Rob Ullmann (Lotus), and Lixia Zhang (Xerox).

Almost none of which are academics and it wasn't the 1980s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Working-group_proposals

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1752.txt (Appendix B)

That was the initial working party looking at what came after ipv4 not the RFC - by that time the damage had been done.

Your documents are later ones to the initial one I saw which was all academics plus one guy from bell labs.

What specifically do you think is bad about IPv6?

No thought about how the migration from ipv4 to ipv6 to be handled is the main one.

Where do you get the idea that there were no thoughts about how to handle the migration?

(hint: there were, lots of them, it's a hard problem, mostly for psychological reasons, technically, it's mostly trivial.)

Is that a typo, did you mean late 90's?

No I used to do OSI based networking for the UK's main x.400 domain - and we knew about the ip4 address exhaustion back then and I looked at some of the initial proposals.

By the late 80's it was obvious that the way that ipv6 was proposed was not tenable - it should have been killed 20 years ago.

IPv6 was proposed in the mid-90s: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1752

However, what is non-tenable about IPv6, and how was this obvious in the 80s?

IPv6 wasn't proposed until 1996...

the RFC was published then but they had been working on it well before that

The proposal for "IPng" that became IPv6 was selected in August 1994. It and various other proposed protocols had been under discussion in the IETF for roughly the previous two years (from memory). Prior to that the IPv4 address exhaustion issue was certainly known about. For example OSI CLNS had (has?) variable length addresses and was for a while a contender for IPng. NAT actually extended the lifetime of IPv4 by decades. In 1994 we were forecasting the end of IPv4 with the introduction of Windows95! Conversely, the biggest benefit IPv6 brings today is avoidance of NAT.