7. Historical Notes

This section preserves the RFC text for FNV, including FNV primes, offset_basis, endianism, XOR folding, constants, non-cryptographic security guidance, source code, test code, Makefile, and comparisons with SHA-1 and SHA-256.

Original RFC Text

7.  Historical Notes

   The FNV hash algorithm originated from an idea submitted as reviewer
   comments to the IEEE POSIX P1003.2 committee [IEEE] in 1991 by Glenn
   Fowler and Phong Vo.  Subsequently, during a ballot round, Landon
   Curt Noll proposed an enhancement to their algorithm.  Some people
   tried this hash and found that it worked rather well.  In an email
   message to Landon, they named it the "Fowler/Noll/Vo" or FNV hash
   from their last names in alphabetical order [FNV].

   The string used to calculate the offset_basis values (see
   Section 2.2) was selected because the person testing FNV with non-
   zero offset_basis values was looking at an email message from Landon
   and was copying his standard email signature line; however, they "did
   not see very well" [FNV] and copied it incorrectly.  In fact, Landon
   uses

                         chongo (Landon Curt Noll) /\oo/\

   but, since it doesn't matter, no effort has been made to correct
   this.