Comment by egwynn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egwynn | Hacker News Reader

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Found this link in one of the responses on that page:

https://superuser.com/questions/784978/why-did-the-ietf-spec...

    Similarly, I expect Postel picked 192.168 because, at the time he made the
    choice, it was the next available, or nearly the next available, network to be
    assigned from the former Class C space. This probably can't be proved one way
    or the other, but the pace of address assignments shown in the RFCs strongly
    suggests that they would have been in this general vicinity around 1993-1994
    when the assignments were made. (Addresses in 192.159 were being assigned in
    1992. No dates are available for assignments in 192.160-192.167 as these were
    at some point reallocated to RIPE.)

Text formatted as code on HN is very difficult to read when on mobile. Using italics or > to quote things is better.

Similarly, I expect Postel picked 192.168 because, at the time he made the choice, it was the next available, or nearly the next available, network to be assigned from the former Class C space. This probably can't be proved one way or the other, but the pace of address assignments shown in the RFCs strongly suggests that they would have been in this general vicinity around 1993-1994 when the assignments were made. (Addresses in 192.159 were being assigned in 1992. No dates are available for assignments in 192.160-192.167 as these were at some point reallocated to RIPE.)

To be clear, the 192 part is the lowest "Class C" network prefix. The 168 part was the arbitrary time-dependent part from the allocation database.

Correct, thanks for making that explicit.

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