Passwords are the keystone to account security. Learn how to reset passwords, set password expiration periods, and enforce password changes on your Linux network in this How-To Geek tutorial.
We’ve been proving to computers that we are who we say we are since the mid-1960s, when the password was first introduced. Necessity being the mother of invention, the Compatible Time-Sharing System developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology needed a way to identify different people on the system. It also needed to prevent people from seeing each other’s files.
Fernando J. Corbató proposed a scheme that allocated a unique username to each person. To prove someone was who they said they were, they had to use a private, personal password to access their account.
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