Port 215 sits in the well-known ports range (0-1023), officially assigned by IANA to a service called "softpc" from Insignia Solutions. Both TCP and UDP protocols were assigned, registered by Martyn Thomas in the early days of Internet port allocation.
The problem: SoftPC hasn't existed as a commercial product for over two decades. This port is a fossil.
What SoftPC Was
SoftPC was a software emulator of x86 hardware, created by Insignia Solutions in 1986.1 It was genuinely important for its time—it let UNIX workstations and Macintosh computers run DOS and Windows software without PC hardware.
The first version shipped for Sun workstations in 1988. A Mac version followed the same year.1 In 1993, Insignia partnered with Microsoft to bundle Windows with the emulator, rebranding it as SoftWindows.1
For a brief window in the 1990s, before x86 processors dominated everything, SoftPC mattered. It was serious enough that someone at Insignia Solutions went through the process of registering an official IANA port number for network communication.
What the Port Was For
SoftPC supported network protocols including Novell IPX and TCP/IP.2 It emulated COM and LPT ports for serial and parallel communication.2 Port 215 was presumably used for some aspect of this network functionality—communication between SoftPC instances, license verification, or remote management.
The exact protocol details are lost to time. No RFC documents it. The software is archived but barely documented.
What Happened
Competition arrived. Connectix released Virtual PC in 1996.1 More importantly, the conditions that made SoftPC necessary started disappearing. x86 processors got faster and cheaper. Apple eventually switched to Intel chips entirely. Emulation became virtualization.
Insignia Solutions sold the SoftPC product line to FWB Software in October 1999 to focus on Java for mobile devices.1 The product line died quietly. The company pivoted, then faded.
But port 215 remains, permanently assigned in the IANA registry, reserved for software that no longer runs anywhere.
The Well-Known Ports Range
Port 215 occupies space in the well-known ports range (0-1023). These are the original port assignments, controlled by IANA, meant for standardized services that everyone needs to agree on. HTTP is 80. HTTPS is 443. SSH is 22.
And SoftPC is 215.
This is what happens to namespace over time. In the early Internet, if your software seemed important enough, you could get an official port assignment. Many of those assignments are now permanent reservations for extinct technology.
IANA doesn't reassign well-known ports. Once allocated, they stay allocated. The namespace slowly fills with ghosts.
Security Notes
Some older security databases flag port 215 as historically used by trojans or malware.3 This doesn't mean the port itself is dangerous—it means that once legitimate software stopped using it, malware sometimes repurposed it for command-and-control communication.
An open port 215 on a modern system is unusual. There's no current legitimate software that should be listening there.
Checking What's Listening
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
If something is listening on port 215, it's worth investigating what it is. The official service it was assigned to hasn't existed in over 20 years.
Why This Matters
Port 215 is unremarkable. It never carried critical Internet infrastructure. SoftPC was never a protocol that millions of people depended on.
But multiply this story by hundreds of obsolete assignments in the well-known ports range, and you start to see the problem: the Internet's namespace is partially fossilized. Valuable, easily-remembered port numbers are permanently locked to services that no longer exist, while new protocols crowd into the registered and dynamic ranges.
The Internet keeps running, but it carries its history like geological strata. Every abandoned port number is a layer of sediment from an earlier era of computing.
Port 215 is one small fossil in that layer. A PC emulator from 1988, important enough to need an official address, dead since 1999, still holding its place in the registry.
The Internet never forgets. It just stops listening.
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