3 ms·

No reason at all. Novell Netware did exactly this. The host portion of your address was your MAC. Networks were identified by their local netware servers.

• neild 14y ago
  That's pretty much exactly what IPv6 with stateless autoconfig does--network address in the upper 64 bits, MAC address (slightly modified) in the lower 64.
• astrodust 14y ago
  This is one of the reasons why IPX was a bad idea and never took off. Automagical discovery is always great until it doesn't work.
  • bdunbar 14y ago
    and never took off. IPX was everywhere NetWare was. NetWare got into everything, like dust, in the 80s and part of the 90s.
    • astrodust 14y ago
      Being prevalent, which it no doubt was, and being pervasive are two different things. IP has a way of worming itself into every little thing. IPX never really escaped from the desktop network environment.
      • bdunbar 14y ago
        I did not know that pervasive was synonym for 'took off'.