2. History of the protocol.

The practice of using pegs for assigning IP-numbers was first used at the HIP event (http://www.hip97.nl/). HIP stands for Hacking In Progress, a large three-day event where more then a thousand hackers from all over the world gathered. This event needed to have a TCP/IP lan with an Internet connection. Visitors and participants of the HIP could bring along computers and hook them up to the HIP network.

During preparations for the HIP event we ran into the problem of how to assign IP-numbers on such a large scale as was predicted for the event without running into troubles like assigning duplicate numbers or skipping numbers. Due to the variety of expected computers with associated IP stacks a software solution like a Unix DHCP server would probably not function for all cases and create unexpected technical problems.

So a way of centrally administrating IP-numbers and giving them out to people to use on their computers had to be devised. After some discussion, the idea came up of using wooden clothes-pegs. Using pegs has the following advantages in respect to other methods:

• cheap
• a peg is a 'token' and represents one IP-number, therefore making the status of the IP-number (allocated or not allocated) visible.
• a peg can be clipped to a network cable giving a very clear view of where a given IP-number is in use.

Credits for the original idea of using wooden pegs go to Daniel Ockeloen.