On 17 Jun 2018, at 18:58, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

One of two things was going to be true of the 'Internet' (that name didn't
exist then, but it's a convenient tag): i) It was going to be a failure (in
which case, it probably didn't matter what was done, or ii) it was going to be
a success, in which case that 32-bit field was clearly going to be a crippling
problem.

There's a third possibility: if implementation of the specification is too complicated it will fail, while if the implementation is simple enough it may succeed, in which case the specification which allowed the simple implementation will eventually become a problem.

I don't know whether IP falls into that category, but I think a lot of things do.

--tim