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FTP Is 40 Years Old
An anonymous reader writes "FTP celebrates its 40th birthday tomorrow. Originally launched as the RFC 114 specification, which was published on 16 April 1971, FTP is arguably even more important today than when it was born. Frank Kenney, vice president of global strategy for US managed file transfer company Ipswitch, said that the protocol we know as FTP today is 'a far cry from when Abhay Bushan, a student at MIT, wrote the original specifications for FTP.' According to Kenney, the standard has grown from 'a simple protocol to copy files over a TCP-based network [to] a sophisticated, integrated model that provides control, visibility, compliance and security in a variety of environments, including the cloud.'"
Now die!
Of course we do. It's imperative in today's business environment to deploy file transfer protocols based on integrated models that work in the cloud with compliance. Just imagine what FTP was like before it had compliance in the cloud. I don't get how anyone got anything done.
FTP died in 1993, murdered by httpd and the Mosaic browser. I watched it die. I shed no tears.
I agree (though if you are going to consider sftp, please also consider ftps), but it has been surprisingly durable. Rivals, historically, have included fsp, scp, rsync, uucp, WAIS, gopher and ftpmail. Some, like WAIS and gopher, also provided a far superior interface to the traditional FTP client.
Of these, scp and rsync are the only ones still in use today and I don't know of any anonymous FTP sites that provides scp, though I think kernel.org provides rsync.
About the only significant change to FTP since it began was that people used to use archie to find programs. (Archie, for those too young to remember, was a search engine specifically for anonymous FTP sites. You gave it a regexp, it gave you every site that had files that matched and the full directory path of those files. Because it was specialized, there was no risk of clutter. Equally, there was no chance it would survive into the era of web crawlers and generalized search engines.
) . . . . . . whew!
You expect me to hire a portrait-man? I adjust my monocle and twirl my mustache in indignation, you son of a loose woman!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?