Comment by convolvatron

if you went back to 1981 and said 'yeah, this is great. but what we really want to do is not have an internet, but kind of a piecewise internet. instead of a global address we'll use addresses that have a narrower scope. and naturally as consequence of this we'll need to start distinguishing between nodes that everyone can reach, service nodes, and nodes that no one can reach - client nodes. and as a consequence of this we'll start building links that are asymmetric in bandwidth, since one direction is only used for requests and acks and not any data volume.'

they would have looked at you and asked straight out what you hoped to gain by making these things distinguished, because it certainly complicates things.