[vajrabum]

/etc/shadow was born not because /etc/passwd had a plain text password but because the hashes became crackable and /etc/passwd is a public read file. Linux has never had them. Here's the man page indicating encrypted passwords for Unix v7 /etc/passwd release in 1979: https://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th/5/passwd

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Whoops! My bad, this is an even better bit of trivia.

My mistaken memory really sells the underlying point that everything old is new again.

[hinkley]

I have a vague recollection of my 20 floppy of Slackware already having /etc/shadow. That would have been fall of 92 or winter 93, based on where I was living at the time.

[mmcgaha]

I have a vague recollection of being given the choice on a 90s vintage distribution with some warning about security and password length if I did not use shadow passwords. At some point in the early 2000s we started authenticating regular users against AD but the shadow file was still there for root.

[hinkley]

We had a couple of labs of sparcstations that just went away a couple of times a year because something bad would happen with all of the NFS mounted partitions and they'd have to turn the cluster on one box at a time to prevent thundering herd issues with NFS.

I think they may have been mounting parts of /etc as well. People get the idea that managing accounts for a cluster of boxes should be centralized. It's all fun and games until the network mount disappears.

[fuzztester]

Shadow file was definitely from quite a while ago.

Can't remember exact date, but might have been around time of SVR4 intro.

I know because I remember going "ugh", but without investigating the reason why it (shadow) was introduced :) - which was of course wrong on my part.