NAT usage at large companies (was: Re: [e2e] Number of persistent connections per HTTP server?)

[Bill Manning]

% Can you suggest (or imply :-) what large organizations would deploy
% NATs as their primary means of gatewaying traffic to the Internet?
% 
%    -John Heidemann

back in the day, a couple of the companies (defense contractors) I 
worked for did not connect the corporate network directly to the ARPAnet.  
They would build a "shell" of machines that would emulate everything needed
to communicate from inside to outside and then, using ALGs would
pump the data between the shell and the soft, chewy interior.

(internal networks were DECnet Phase4, NETBIOS, Chaos, SNA/VTAM, and
a bit of IP)

Access to the live Internet was restricted to specific locations.
Then I went back to academia and helped with running the NSFnet.


--bill