Colin Robbins has published on his blog a “Prehistory of LDAP“, which describes some of the origins of the standard.

All of this predates my involvement with LDAP, directory servers and even X.500, but I feel related to it, since the names, projects or people, he mentions are familiar to me and I had the chance to meet or even work with some of them.

Anyway, for the curious who want to understand the roots of LDAP, it’s definitely worth reading.