Positional history refers to a character or numeric value and its location in a password. For example, if you had the password of “J2D3F4G5” and were required to change this you could not use “J8E4C9r1” since the “J” is located in the same position of the previous password. In a 6 cycle rotation, this would be checked and held not valid until the seventh cycle where the J could be used in position once again.