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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

The list of TCP and UDP port numbers [1] is a treasure trove of historical artefacts. It's amazingly hard to find information on e.g. "compressnet", which is wasting port 2 and port 3 for eternity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbe...

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There is this magazine ad about it: Network World Sep 16, 1991 page 5

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ww0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA4&dq=com...

I was skeptical at first but found evidence to corroborate it's the same thing, the key fact being the company named Process Software.

The reference in RFC1340 for it says "Bernie Volz" of process.com. Searching on that let me to a Web-0.9 style page with the text "compressnet/tcp is a protocol that is used to compress TCP connections for WANS. It used two ports to compress tcp conections, one to send the compressed TCP connection data through, and one used for the management of CompressNet. This is a commercial product only."

https://donsnotes.com/tech/networks/internet/proto/compressn...

Available also at /etc/services or %SystemDrive%\%SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\services

id Software's Doom having port 666 (unofficially) assigned is a nice touch.

Actually official list: <https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...>

Another similar trivia is present in PCI-IDs. Intel got 8086 for themselves.

Some other notable examples:

    Broadcom/LSI: 1000
    Motorola: c0de
    Chrysalis-ITS: cafe
    Blackmagic bdbd
    Indigita Corporation dead
    Middle Digital Inc. deaf
    Elcus e1c5
    Eagle Tech ea01
    Essence Tech e55e
    Echo ecc0
    Daiblo Tech db10
    Canny Edge caed
    CACE Tech cace

There are many more examples, but it's enough, I think.

If you want to dive, source: https://pci-ids.ucw.cz/

Some of the tcp headers are the same. Bits for companies I can barely find info about

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