I’ve been meaning to look this up for a while, but never quite got around to it. Most of today has been spent writing an article for a local newspaper on how we might drive IPv6 adoption in the region. As part of that I finally discovered where IPv5 went!
Raffi Krikorian has one of the more succinct descriptions over on O’Reilly;
IPng, Internet Protocol next generation, was conceived in 1994 with a goal for implementations to start flooding out by 1996 (yeah, like that ever happened). IPv6 was supposed to be the “god-send” over the well-used IPv4: it increased the number of bytes used in addressing from 4 bytes to 16 bytes, it introduced anycast routing, it removed the checksum from the IP layer, and lots of other improvements. One of the fields kept, of course, was the version field — these 8 bits identify this IP header as being of version “4? when there is a 4 in there, and presumably they would use a “5? to identify this next gen version. Unfortunately, that “5? was already given to something else.
In the late 1970’s, a protocol named ST — The Internet Stream Protocol — was created for the experimental transmission of voice, video, and distributed simulation. Two decades later, this protocol was revised to become ST2 and started to get implemented into commercial projects by groups like IBM, NeXT, Apple, and Sun. Wow did it differ a lot. ST and ST+ offered connections, instead of its connection-less IPv4 counterpart. It also guaranteed QoS. ST and ST+, were already given that magical “5″.
You’ll find his original post from 2003 linked here.
So, now you know!