As time passes, memories begin to fade and get jumbled up in our minds. As it turns out, the same thing applies to technologies: Back in the 1980s, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), as the acronym implies, was created as a communications idiom for applications to get/put information from/to an open system interconnection (OSI) X.500 directory service. (As a historic note, LDAP was originally created because X386 PCs running DOS couldn't load X.500's usual access protocol -- Directory Access Protocol (DAP) -- into DOS's required 640K of RAM, and a "lightweight" version of DAP was needed so these platforms could query the directory.) Though X.500 directories and x386 PCs have gone the way of the dinosaur, the ideal of a generic, open architecture repository for people and identities continues to live.

While only LDAP remains of the original X.500 directory services standards, it has now moved from a low protocol in support of DOS PCs to the name for the directory service itself. But not only has the memory of LDAP been jumbled up with the repository it was used to access, the concept of an open architecture -- OpenLDAP -- has also been confused with LDAP itself. Many companies now have "LDAP-compliant" directories -- e.g. Microsoft's Active Directory, IBM's Tivoli Directory Service, Oracle Corp.'s Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition, etc. -- yet they all carry internally proprietary architectures. When X.500 died, so did the ideal of an open architecture repository.