Port 142: Britton-Lee IDM — The Ghost of the Database Machine

Port 142 is officially assigned by IANA to bl-idm, the Britton-Lee Intelligent Database Machine protocol¹. No traffic flows on this port today. The company that claimed it dissolved in 1990. But the story of what happened here, and where the people went afterward, is one of the most consequential lineages in database history.

What Britton-Lee Built

In 1979, David Britton and Geoffrey Lee founded a company with a radical premise: databases deserved their own hardware². Not a general-purpose computer running database software. A machine purpose-built for storing and retrieving data.

They recruited Robert Epstein, Paula Hawthorn, and Michael Ubell straight from the UC Berkeley team that had created Ingres, one of the first relational database systems³. Together, they built the Intelligent Database Machine, the IDM.

The IDM was released in 1981. It ran on Zilog Z80 processors with a specialized operating system stripped down for data access. It had its own query language (IDL), its own transaction manager, its own concurrency control. It was, in the language of the era, a "database backend" — a dedicated box that sat on the network and did nothing but answer queries⁴.

Port 142 was where you talked to it.

The Bet That Lost

The idea behind dedicated database hardware made intuitive sense in the early 1980s. General-purpose computers were slow. Operating systems were bloated. If you could strip away everything except the database, you could make queries fly.

By 1985, Britton-Lee had shipped over 350 IDMs to more than 100 customers. NASA used them. The US Marine Corps used them. Financial services firms ran them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week⁵. The Computer History Museum holds an IDM 500 in its permanent collection⁶.

But the bet was against the tide. General-purpose hardware was getting faster, exponentially. Client-server architecture was emerging. The advantage of dedicated hardware was shrinking with every new processor generation. As Jim Gray noted at the 1995 SQL Reunion, the notion that "you could do much better by building special-purpose hardware and a special-purpose operating system for database systems" simply did not hold⁷.

Britton and Lee left the company in 1987. It renamed itself ShareBase Corporation in 1989. After layoffs and financial losses, Teradata acquired it in June 1990².

Where the People Went

Here is the part that matters.

Robert Epstein left Britton-Lee to co-found Sybase². Sybase became the #2 database product behind Oracle through the 1980s and into the 1990s. In 1992, Microsoft licensed the Sybase codebase and rebranded it as Microsoft SQL Server³.

The code that powers millions of SQL Server instances today traces a direct line back to the Berkeley Ingres team, through Britton-Lee, through Sybase. Port 142 is a waypoint on that journey. The machine is gone. The DNA is everywhere.

The Port Today

Port 142 sits in the well-known range (0–1023), which means it was assigned through IETF review and is reserved by IANA for a specific service⁸. That service no longer exists.

The port is not entirely quiet in network logs. A trojan called NetTaxi has historically used TCP port 142 for command-and-control communication. Microsoft classifies it as Trojan:Win32/NetTaxi.1_8⁹. This is a common fate for abandoned well-known ports: malware moves into the empty rooms.

If you see traffic on port 142 today, it is almost certainly not a Britton-Lee database machine. Investigate it.

How to Check What Is Listening on Port 142

Linux:

sudo lsof -i :142
sudo ss -tlnp | grep :142

macOS:

lsof -i :142

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :142

Why Abandoned Ports Matter

The well-known port range contains 1,024 slots. Many of them, like port 142, are assigned to services that no longer exist. They are historical markers, not active infrastructure.

But they are not meaningless. Every abandoned port is evidence that someone once believed in something enough to register it with IANA. Someone thought the Britton-Lee IDM would be important enough to deserve a permanent address in the first 1,024 ports of the Internet's nervous system.

They were not wrong about the importance of databases. They were wrong about the form factor. The lesson port 142 teaches is that good ideas sometimes arrive in the wrong container, and the people who had those ideas often carry them forward into containers that work.