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

[Tony Li]

And using 127.0.0.0 or any of other other well known 'martians' would 
have required a number of legacy systems to change, as the martians 
table was well established by then.

Tony


Louis Mamakos wrote:
> 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
>>
> 
>