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The best answer in this old thread (Jan 2021, be sure to open the [thread] view) seems to be this: https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2021-Janu

• shadowgovt 4y ago
  This, coupled with the previous answer that because the class A 127 had been reserved, it was hard to tell for backwards compatibility reasons what shenanigans had gone on in that whole subnet, seems to explain how we lost a whole class A subnet to the same function.