History of Passwords
When companies first started buying computers in the mid-1980s, people quickly realized that they needed to protect the information they entered into their computers. An easy way to secure the information was to have users identify themselves with a user ID when they logged on to the system.
This was a good start, but because it was fairly easy to figure out someone’s user ID, little could stop someone from logging in as someone else. Based on this problem, passwords were added to the user ID. With this additional security step, users not only provided their user ID to identify who they were, but they also provided a password that was known only by them, to prove their identity to the system. What did most users do? They ...
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