[IgorPartola]

Why in god's name did they make it 14?!

[pjc50]

Ethernet was invented in 1973 and the first 32-bit processors were available in 1979.

While you've got the time machine, can you fix it so that "network byte order" and Intel endianness are the same too?

[swiley]

Or rather keep Intel from munging the order their processors write bytes in.

[adrianratnapala]

What?

[drewg123]

The 32-bit Vax 11/780 was introduced in 1977 and IEEE 802.3 was not finalized until 1983. So they could/should have done something about it I think.

Come to think of it, the Vax was little endian (like Intel).

[jandrese]

It's all they needed. 6 bytes per address, and 2 more bytes to mark the protocol. Back in the 70s and 80s memory was very expensive and developers bent over backwards to save bytes everywhere. This is also why IP addresses are only 32 bits long, even though they knew that it wouldn't be enough if the protocol went global.

Hindsight is 20/20, and a lot of times people don't appreciate the constraints these old systems had. This was being developed decade before the Commodore 64 came out with its luxurious 64 kilobytes of memory (39k usable).

[jimktrains2]

They didn't feel like they needed those 2 bytes and, hey, why waste space?

Also, was a "byte" standardized at the time? Didn't they still have systems working in not-8-bit "byte", nibbles, byte, and 2-byte boundaries?

[danesparza]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#History - a byte was in the process of getting standardized at around the same time.