A brief history of the UUID · Segment Blog
segment.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-uuid
What Jamie wrote
I enjoy these retrospectives that share some history on otherwise ordinary topics, this one on the ubiquitous UUID. I didn’t realize that Apollo was the first organization to introduce these! There were some Apollo workstations at the U of MN in the early 90's.
Network Computing Architecture (NCA) introduced UUIDs, which built on the UID design, but accommodated a broader range of vendors by extending the number space to 128-bits. Thus the UUID was born. This concept was so useful that even after NCA became a distant memory and RPC fell out of fashion, the UUID remained popular, eventually being standardized by ISO, IETF, and ITU.
It is an interesting read about the various approaches to creating UUIDs.