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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.'"
Correction: FTP is only 3 years older than TCP. Still, it predates TCP and is really damn old.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
no command line HTTP file transfer clients ever sprang up
Let me introduce you to wget and curl.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
SFTP has nothing to do with FTP, nor is it a wrapper. It is based on SSH, not FTP.
Here's a little more background on the various generations of the FTP protocol.
First Generation (1971-1980)
The original specification for FTP (RFC 114) was published in 1971 by Abhay Bhushan of MIT. This standard introduced down many concepts and conventions that survive to this day including: ASCII vs. "binary" transfers, Username authentication (passwords were "elaborate" and "not suggested" at this stage) , "Retrieve", "Store", "Append", "Delete" and "Rename" commands, Partial and resumable file transfer , A protocol "designed to be extendable", Two separate channels: one for "control information", the other for "data", and Unresolved character translation and blocking factor issues
Second Generation (1980-1997)
The second generation of FTP (RFC 765) was rolled out in 1980 by Jon Postel of ITI. This standard retired RFC 114 and introduced more concepts and conventions that survive to this day, including: A formal architecture for separate client/server functions and two separate channels, Site-to-site transfers, Passive (a.k.a. "firewall friendly") transfer mode and The 3-digits-followed-by-text command response convention. ...and RFC 765 was replaced by RFC 959 (which formalized directory navigation) in 1985.
Third Generation (1997-current)
The third and current generation of FTP was a reaction to two technologies that RFC 959 did not address: SSL/TLS and IPv6.
Most FTP software now conforms to RFC 2228 for FTPS. Oddly enough, there are still a LOT of file transfer packages that still don't have IPv6 or EPSV support. The RFCs beyond IPv6 and EPSV support are pretty well baked, so if you're still dealing with a vendor without those attributes, consider that a big red flag.
Also keep an eye on draft-ietf-ftpext2-hash and draft-peterson-streamlined-ftp-command-extensions - that's where the action is in FTP today.