Hah! And another interesting tidbit, the guy who invented PAM worked for me. The problem we had was that I had designed this new "secure" name server, that a nu

Hah! And another interesting tidbit, the guy who invented PAM worked for me. The problem we had was that I had designed this new "secure" name server, that a number of folks were working together to make real and the existing SunOS code could only talk to either Yellowpages (nee YP, nee NIS) or files. I was adding this new thing (NIS+[1]) and we has crossed the threshold that now we had three things you might want to use for authentication (and things like host lookups too!) His name was Andrew, he was Australian and was depressed because he felt like none of the work he was doing would live very long. I tried to explain to him that this part of the problem was very important and it would last a long time but he didn't believe me. It out lasted NIS+ to be sure! Oh, and I was also in the Java group after I moved from the Systems Group and the first implementation of PAM was in 1991 if you can believe it. It definitely pre-dated Java and when I joined "Firstperson" (which was the soooper seekrit project that was developing 'oak' which was to become Java) in 1992 the target was embedded systems like TVs or set top boxes not the web. [1] Which was called the Zeus Name Service or ZNS at the time.