[ih] The Internet Plan; was: Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Jim Wise]

Dave CROCKER <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> writes:

>> This was years before PGP (which of course appeared in part as a counterpoint
>> to PEM, since the top-down authentication model of PEM didn't sit well with
>> everyone).
>
>
> FWIW, I suspect Phil did not know about PEM.  A couple of histories about
> PGP don't mention the connection, plus Phil was not in the IETF mix:
>
>    <http://library.thinkquest.org/27158/concept2_7_2.html>
>
> Note the 1991 date.
>
> RFC 989, defining PEM, is dated 1987.  Still the odds are good that PEM did
> not motivate PGP.

FWIW, the 2.3A release of PGP, from July 1, 1993, specifically mentions
PEM in the documentation, commenting that:

  This probablistic fault-tolerant method of determining public key
  legitimacy is one of the principle strengths of PGP's key management
  architecture, as compared with PEM, for decentralized social
  environments.

That's the oldest version of PGP that I have sources for, though, so I
don't know whether this connection was made in the original 1.0 release
of June 1991.

-- 
				Jim Wise
				jwise at draga.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 192 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20110216/21cb32df/attachment.sig>