Today, noted Internet hall of famer, Dallas McStingray in his keynote address to the Learned Society of Header Collectors, laid out a confronting vision of the future for routing - computers are coming.
As McStingray valiantly explained to his audibly skeptical audience, soon, everyone will have access to powerful computers - even small children will have computers that can fit in their tiny, ooze coated hands. We will live in a future where flying computers in drones can stream 4K videos in real time, and grade schoolers will train machine learning models on USB accelerator boards that can perform several teraflops per second with less than 5W of power.
McStringray acknowledged, that today of course, as is common knowledge and has been well proven by august and unimpeachable bodies as the Royal Society for Distribributed State, routers are not computers. Because routers are not computers, they simply do not have the computational ompf to handle vast databases containing as many as a million entries - an unimaginably vast number that cannot possibly fit in the addressable memory of the best selling computer of all time, the Commodore 64’s 64kB.
However, McStingray astounded his interlocutors with his central thesis - what if we could use some kind of “software”, to run BGP on a computer? Unlike routers which he again stressed are not computers (despite having CPU, memory, an ability to run holy software produced by the church and cannot be questioned on pain of death), a Computer, such as one on your desktop, may be able to hold not just one database with a million entries, but perhaps dozens - even hundreds of copies.
Further, using other amazing technologies such as GPUs or even FPGAs, newly introduced only in the late 1980s, we may one day soon be able to perform an unimaginably vast number of cryptographic hashes per second if required.
McStingray had a fascinating series of backup slides with images of Computers, but unfortunately we never got to see him as McStringray was removed mid sentence from the stage, under cries of “sedition” and an as used unproven accusation of possessing an inappropriately long AS path in a public exchange without an ACL.