The term firewall has seen limited use since the late 1980s to describe a device to block unwanted network traffic while allowing other traffic to pass. The first published description of a "modern" firewall including use of that name was in 'Practical Unix Security' written in 1990 and published in 1991. The first description of a firewall, although not by that name, was also in 1990, in a paper by Bill Cheswick. A few of the industry pioneers tried to track down the origin of the word as described in this context. They found several referenc ....