[ih] What is the origin of the private network address 192.168.*.*?

[Louis Mamakos]

I think that I recall at the time there was desire to have class-A,  
class-B and class-C private address space for private networks.  I'm  
not sure where the lined up against the transition to CIDR-style  
prefixes, but there were a considerable number of "legacy" systems at  
the time that had classfull IP addresses wired into their code.

As Craig pointed out, net 10 was easy, as it had just been recently  
decommissioned.  Perhaps the class-B and class-C prefixes just  
happened to be where the IANA was in the allocation process at the time?

Louis Mamakos

On Sep 10, 2009, at 3:33 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> The excellent Q&A site Server Fault has an interesting question, which
> may interest some persons here. Answer directly on Server Fault (you
> need to log in with an OpenID identifier) or post here and I'll write
> it back to Server Fault.
>
> http://serverfault.com/questions/64013/what-is-the-origin-of-the-private-network-address-192-168
>
> I had a smart (but non-technical) user ask me today:
>
> Why did they pick 192.168.. for a private network address?
>
> The only answer I could come up with is because 192 = 11000000 in  
> binary. And 168 is 10101000 in binary. Both of which are kind of  
> cool looking.
>
> Is there a real historical reason for that particular choice of  
> numbers? Why not 127.127..? Or 128.128..?
>
> Similar question for 10.0.0.0 and 172.16.0.0
>