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Comment by ewpatton | Hacker News Reader

I have occasionally wondered about this, specifically from a human factors point of view. I recall an exercise a professor conducted in my intro to psych course as an undergraduate. Try to remember and recall this sequence of numbers:

1...7...7...6...1...8...1...2...1...8...6...5...1...9...1...8...1...9...4...5

And then try to remember and recall this sequence:

1776...1812...1865...1918...1945

Pretty much everyone finds the latter easier even though they are effectively equivalent. This was done as a demonstration of Miller's 7+-2 model of working memory.

I sometimes wonder if the reason IPv4 continues to stick around and IPv6 hasn't gotten the uptake we need is because the former fits into the memory models needed by the end users (developers) whereas a space of 2^128 instead of 2^32 starts pushing the boundary of what a human operator can easily keep in memory.

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I mean, those numbers would be significant to an American with some grasp of history. That doesn't seem like the same thing as memorizing 5 random 4 digit numbers.

I agree though that IPv6 has some human factor problems. You can actually use IPv4 addresses in it like ::10.0.0.1 - that's valid IPv6 if you wanted to use it on your own networks at least.

Sure, this was a class at an American university, the context of those particular numbers is important as an example, but the exercise likely transfers to other relevant dates in other countries. At the core of it though is that arguably there are IPs (numbers) in any org that might be worth committing to memory because systems can and do fail, and for humans it seems to me that encoding IPv4 is inherently easier than encoding IPv6. My (untested) hypothesis is that this may be at least somewhat of a contributing factor to the slowness of IPv6 adoption (IMO the other more prevalent one being the market factors re. IPv4 scarcity). I just thought it was an interesting parallel to share.

Interesting reference I'm not sure though how many people actually keep IP addresses in their memory. Even with IPv4 I usually copy paste the entire address unless I'm sure only one of the octets have changed. I wonder if others do the same.

I only remember the last 2 octets since we own the entire 132.20 space and most 131 and 132 in general for my job.

I did phone support for a dial-up ISP 20 years ago. I can still remember their IP for www., as well as ns1. and ns2.

And I’ll probably take the root password to their RADIUS server to my grave.

For ipv4, i will often memorize an address for short periods of time, to type them in somewhere else, or to be able to recognize a particular address in logs or something.

With ipv6, that's less doable.

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