What does AddressFamily.FireFox refer to in .NET sockets?

Question

In System.Net.Sockets.AddressFamily there are a number of obvious entries like InterNetwork, AppleTalk and Ipx. There's also one for "FireFox". I assume this has nothing to do with the "Firefox" browser since a. it's cased differently and b. why would the Firefox browser have its own network address type. So what the heck is this for? Was there a FireFox network protocol? I've googled around and searched wikipedia but any search for FireFox and network protocol gets, not surprisingly, thousands of hits for the Firefox browser. I'm guessing this is a long-obsolete network protocol like Banyan Vines.

Can anyone enlighten me on what AddressFamily.FireFox is for?

Answer 1

I was curious so I did some Googling around. All of this is based on creative searching; not on any special knowledge that I have, so take it with a grain of salt.

FYI I'm new so I can only post one link, so URLs are included below the text.

Searching for Mark S. Edwards led me to this mail archive (1), which gives the company as Firefox Communications Ltd. Googling for that exact company name reveals a number of links to a product of theirs called Novix, which was apparently a gateway (2) between NetWare IPX networks and the TCP/IP internet back in the day. It seems that Novix had pretty good Winsock integration (3), which (I'm speculating) is where the AF_FIREFOX and PF_FIREFOX entries in winsock.h came from. Since System.Net.Sockets.AddressFamily is just a port of that old header file, the company lives on in Microsoft's massive set of supported, legacy APIs.

(1): ftp.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/ftp/pub/net/winsock/winsock-l/faq+txt/winsock2.txt

(2): www.strom.com/pubwork/cwtcp93.html

(3): www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/uw2nw.html