Just saw Ron reply, I remember when that happened - (it could have been you guys) but after we sold our first Masscomp machine to DoD.  We then added a note in the administrator's guide we saying use MC68000 and that was the reason.  

As Ron said, getting the latest from the NIC was standard, gettable(8) was often the way you did it.   We have a script on the Masscomp systems called getmasterhost IIRC that was a little more programmable because so many customers were not yet on the Internet, most were not yet running BIND or the equivalent and kept a static master table some where (and we must have taught them how to so that in the System Managers' guide).