[6bone] came across this article any opinions??

[Chuck Yerkes]

Quoting Paul Aitken (paitken@cisco.com):
> Chuck,
> > Wow!  My opinion is that in 2000 (03/13/00), that this was
> > a reasonable view.  IPv6 and indeed the 6bone wasn't "there."
> >
> > I had early IPv6 support in BSD, none in vendor supplied Unix.
> > Cisco was barely talking about it.
> 
> FWIW, Kirk Lougheed tells me that IPv6 work started in the first week of 
> May 1996 with the first EFT in December '96.

In the context of the article, I'd count "there" not
as "I can get a packet from here to somewhere else"
but rather as "I can actually use this for something more
useful that seeing that it works."

Bell calling Watson didn't count as a phone network.
Phones were only useful when many people had them.

In 2000, I could run IPv6 on a couple OSs, not many.
Patches from playground.sun.com let me get Solaris working,
kind of.  Sendmail, AFAIK, spoke v6 early on (and I pushed
hard to get IPv6 support into the commercial version).

But getting Cisco IOS' that supported it (esp on production
machines) or anything useful out of IPv6 was mostly unlikely
in 3/2000.  Most of us were distracted by the sound of the
big drain starting to suck the economy down anyhow.

Does anyone have a count of 6bone tunnel end points (at the
least) over time?  Any way to track the growth and use of
IPv6 on backbones or particular NAPs and joining points?