As I go through my daily work in web dev, I constantly have questions bouncing around in my head that are too low of a priority to really research. Bu

A Short, Totally Unofficial, History of Port Numbers in Web Development

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2023-01-23 17:30:05

As I go through my daily work in web dev, I constantly have questions bouncing around in my head that are too low of a priority to really research. But, when they bounce around in my head long enough, my curiosity won’t let me sit idly by.

One such bouncing question deals with port numbers. It seems like every time I run npm start on a web project, it’s a roll of the dice as to which port of localhost I’ll get a local dev server on.

I understand perfect uniformity across all projects is unlikely (not everyone will be on port 8000), but it’s also not completely random across the entire spectrum of thousands of ports (I never get a local dev server on 4971 or 9571 or 6373).

Does somebody have an article like "A short history of port numbers" that describes why I never get a consistent default port experience across tools? Some commons ones I consistently see:

why/where did those numbers pop into our collective culture? why not 2000 or 4000? or why not 6666? or any other random number for that matter?