IP Addressing Fundamentals

Private Address Spaces

After the Internet became commercialized, its popularity soared. More importantly, so did the popularity of TCP/IP and its addressing architecture and space. Seemingly overnight, software engineers embraced the TCP/IP communications protocol suite and it became the de facto standard for networked communications between applications. As a direct result of this trend, many organizations began implementing TCP/IP to support their base of applications even though they might not have needed or wanted access to the Internet. Implementing TCP/IP absolutely requires that you also implement the Internet's addressing scheme, regardless of whether you intend to actually use the Internet.

In March 1994, the IETF released RFC 1597. ...