ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers - draft 2

[Chris Caputo]

On Wed, 1 Jan 1997, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
>     Article numbers MUST lie between 1 and 4 294 967 295 inclusive. The
>     client and server SHOULD NOT use leading zeroes in specifying article
>     numbers, and MUST NOT use more than 16 digits. In some situations the
>     value zero replaces an article number to show some special situation.

What was the reasoning on limiting the length to 16 digits?  It seems
arbitrary.

Chris Caputo
President, Altopia Corporation