It's what the internet grew up with, actually.
> That's why when you create a new user on a *nix box, it asks for that information.
That's your local account, not information that is visible to anyone outside of your network.
> That's why when you create a new user on a *nix box, it asks for that information.
That's your local account, not information that is visible to anyone outside of your network.
There are a lot of unix tools to ask networks to query that information and they'll happily do it for other unix systems they connect to. When I was in college in the last 90s, I'd often lookup phone numbers and such of students at other universities using command line unix utilities.
Or do you mean shared mainframes with many users on the same system? That'd still be local to the system, you just happened to have access to that system.
Are you sure you're not just thinking of ldap/directory lookups?