LDAP Programming with Java™

A Brief History of Electronic Directories

I Heard It through the Grapevine

The first widely distributed directory service for sharing user account information among many networked computers was the Xerox Clearinghouse. The Clearinghouse was based on research done around the distributed computing system called Grapevine at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1980s. The Grapevine provided message delivery, resource location, authentication, and access control services in a network of networks (an internet). When completed, it extended across both coasts of the United States and to Canada and England. More than 1,500 computers participated in the more than 50 local networks that were linked by Grapevine. The Grapevine Registration Database ...