It's what I specialized in... I took so many freaking TCP/IP courses, read so-many books, had long talks with just about anyone in the TCP/IP design process... RFP Process, etc...

One reason why Out Of Bit Order Subnet Masking is not standard... Too many people screwed it up!

The Backbone carriers will not route an OOB SNM. mainly cause BGP and so on, work best in CIDR mode. Oh well. Too bad.

I see an awful lot of <127.0.0.0 subnets are starting to get used better now. Some of them have changed hands of late. Although, some companies like ATTBI is getting awful sloppy with re-distributing the 12.X.X.X network.