> It was first explained in the Old (2000 published) Game Programming Gems book in the chapter titled: "A Generic Handle-Based Resource Manager".
It's much older than that. The capability-secure operating system EROS from the early 90s [1] used this technique in its capabilities. Capabilities were kernel-protected 64-bit numbers that mapped to system objects, and they carried a 16-bit generation index that was used to revoke the capability (basically a free operation). It might have even been used in its predecessor KeyKOS from the 80s, I don't recall at this point.
