On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:

>On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 08:51:47PM -0400, Lord Isildur wrote:
>> AFAIK, AFS's ACL (wow all the acronyms :) basics were inherited from an 
>> even older project at CMU, the RFS, which was used in the Mach environment
>> here . AFS superceded it and then they left and founded transarc. Yes, 
>> ACLs predate at least UNIX on something other than PDP11's. I'd probably
>> bet that ACLs in some form or another probably went back to the 60s. I'd 
>> imagine that at least os360, its, multics, and maybe tops10 supported 
>> something of the kind? those are all children of the 60s. 
>
>VMS 3.something.

AFAIR, ACLs appeared in VMS 4.0.  The upgrade to VMS 4 was the first
thing I worked on after starting here in 1985.  ISTR that the advice
on ACLs was "they're there, but if you want performance don't use them
unless you absolutely have to".  Of course that was on an 11/780, but
I wonder if the warning has scared everybody off ever since.

However, the first system I ever used, an ICL 1906S running GEORGE 4
Mk 8, effectively had ACLs *only*.  In other words you could give any
access to any file to any individual user (or group).  That was in the
mid 70's.  But the 1900 architecture was quite a bit older than that --
there were hardware instructions for sterling (currency) arithmetic
(kind of like packed BCD arithmetic, but with carries at 12 and 20 for
pence and shillings).  Britain changed to decimal coinage around 1970,
so there is every chance ACLs were around in the 60's.


Roger

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