who invented CIFS?
Another common myth is to assume that Microsoft “invented” the protocols that Samba implements. To understand how wrong this is you need to know a little bit of history. The protocol that Samba implements was first invented by Barry Feigenbaum at IBM in early 1983. He initially called it the “BAF” protocol after his initials, but changed the name to “SMB” before the first official release. You may note that the name “Samba” contains the letters “SMB”, and that is not a coincidence. The term “CIFS” or “Common Internet File System” was coined by Microsoft in 1996 as a marketing exercise in an attempt to combat a perceived threat from Sun Microsystems after their WebNFS announcement. The term caught on, and now the SMB protocol is often called CIFS. The two names refer to the same protocol, as is easily demonstrated by connecting a current Microsoft “CIFS” client to a Samba “SMB” server from 1992. It should also be noted that SMB/CIFS is an evolving protocol. The original design by Barry
