[comp.protocols.tcp-ip] The history of net 89

keith@excelan.COM (Keith Brown) (06/28/90)

In article <42384@apple.Apple.COM> aek@Apple.COM (Al Kossow) writes:
>What is the history of net 89? I have noticed that early Excelan cards
>used net 89 with the last two digits of the ethernet address as the IP
>number. These were used by Callan and early SGI machines, and by Apple
>as the internal network number up until a year ago.
>

I was wondering if someone was going to "rumble" us!! It's true. It
could well be our "fault". We've been shipping Ethernet TCP/IP products
for all kinds of platforms since 1983(ish) with a "default" IP address
of 89 plus the bottom 3 bytes of the Ethernet address. I believe early
versions of Berkeley (and possibly current versions) can also derive
their IP address in this manner.

For those familiar with our stuff, our default TCP startup scripts all
have "netload" command lines containing the flag "-h 89.0.0.0". The TCP
code this downloads to our various cards will then use the network
number specified (89 in the default case) and replace the zero's in the
host portion with bytes from the lower end of the Ethernet address.

Incidentally, Callan were an early OEM of ours so that's us too! Now I
think about it, SGI were also. Oops!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Keith Brown                                      Phone: (408) 473 8308
Novell San Jose Development Centre               Fax:   (408) 433 0775
San Jose, California 95131                       Net:   keith@novell.COM
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imp@dancer.Solbourne.COM (Warner Losh) (06/28/90)

In article <1474@excelan.COM> keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown) writes:
>Incidentally, Callan were an early OEM of ours so that's us too! Now I
>think about it, SGI were also. Oops!

Then why has TWG's documentation had net 89 as the example net for
many years (at least five now)?  Also, they were using net 89 as their
internal net up until about a year and a half ago.  Just curious.

-- 
Warner Losh		imp@Solbourne.COM