The IP/Ethernet section is surprising to me. It sort of claims that there is no reason to have ARP and give your default router an IP when you could just give i

The IP/Ethernet section is surprising to me. It sort of claims that there is no reason to have ARP and give your default router an IP when you could just give it a MAC address and skip the ARP. Maybe this is true now but it reads like it was a bad idea at the time. I wasn’t there (sounds like Apen was?) so I could be missing context, but I was under the impression that there were loads of layer 2 protocols at the time IP was designed (token ring, frame relay, etc) and so IP needed to be agnostic to the L2 protocol in order to be adopted.