Looks like "someone" was Bill Joy in November 1981: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/commit/3573c034bb533247ae46756dc370f6edec04d287 https://git

Looks like "someone" was Bill Joy in November 1981: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/commit/3573c034bb533247ae46756dc370f6edec04d287 https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/commit/3573c... And we have a better clue as to why: there was a separate "sockaddri" that allowed for indirect references for address sizes > 14 bytes. So the sa_data[14] comes from 16 bytes being the maximum amount of data that Bill Joy was willing to pass around by value instead of by reference. (Actually, that was probably modeled after the older `struct in_addr`, but the headers for that are missing--so I can't tell. Perhaps it was a design decision carried forward from someone else; perhaps someone from BBN?)