Talk:Group identifier (Unix)
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The switch from 16 to 32 bits was originally not necessary—one machine or even one network did not serve more than 65536 users at the time—but was made to elimate the need to do so in the future, when it would be more difficult to implement.
The groups in Unix systems (I think) are made not for "users" management, but rather for "actions" access management. As such the quote above makes little sense and in fact, it's a bit misleading. And really - we can have some info on usual/accepted Unix permissions management policies here or somewhere else.