Once long ago, there was a fancy buzzword with a complex history commonly referred to as DCE/RPC. This stood for Distributed Computing Environment/Remote Procedure Calls and conceptually was a good idea. Commissioned as a conceptual project by the Open Software Foundation, the goal was that programmers would be able to write software that would run across multiple computers without the need to worry about all the messy underlying network code to make it work. When there was a need to run it over TCP so that it would be compatible with Digital Equipment Corporation’s suite of network protocols, it was redesigned, re-submitted and officially became known as DCE/RPC.
Microsoft came along and decided, rather than pay $20 per seat to license this new technology, to re-implement and rebrand DCE/RPC as MS-RPC (Microsoft Remote Procedure Call). From this, the concept continued in the form of SMB (Server Message Block, or the "what") using the NetBIOS (Network Basic Input/Output System, or the "how") compatibility layer. If you’re feeling dizzy with terminology right about now, you’re not alone; DCE/RPC and its assorted companions have a long and convoluted history. Perhaps the best summary of the origins of SMB/CIFS are voiced in the 1997 article by Avian Research, CIFS: Common Insecurities Fail Scrutiny:
"Several megabytes of NT-security archives, random whitepapers, RFCs, the CIFS spec, the Samba stuff, a few MS knowledge-base articles, strings extracted from binaries, and packet dumps have been dutifully waded through during the information-gathering stages of this project, and there are *still* many missing pieces [...] While often tedious, at least the way has been generously littered with occurrences of clapping hand to forehead and muttering ‘crikey, what are they *thinking*?!’"
With all things being what they were, Microsoft kept their implementation of SMB/CIFS (mostly) secret. If you didn’t have a Windows machine, you were out of luck sharing files or printers with other Windows machines. Thus, the need for Samba — a way to mix Windows and Linux machines together without requiring a separate Windows server — was born.
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