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<font size=3>At 08:58 AM 10/7/2006, Dave Crocker wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Since Anonymous FTP was a usage
variation of FTP, rather than a technical enhancement requiring
specification, I'm not sure its inception was documented. I would
guess it was fully functional by 1975, but have no direct memory of who
or when it was started.</font></blockquote><br>
funny you should mention that.<br><br>
from
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<b>"And They Argued All Night..."<br><br>
</b></font></h2><div align="center"><h3><b>...over whose claim was right:
first at which, and for what, and with whom.</i></b></h3></div>
<font size=3><x-tab>
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</x-tab>M.A.
Padlipsky<br>
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<map@multicians.org><br>
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</x-tab>Copyright © 2000
by the author.<br><br>
</font>[matrix news, peter h. salus, editor, somemonthorother, 2000; full
piece still available in/on the author's 'personal web page' even tho the
matrix news site seems to've gone away]:<br><br>
[...] <font size=3>The neat ideas zipped around the design meetings
at a great rate of speed (and volume, usually; in both senses of the
term). Even before we all hit at best EarlyMiddleage (and I fear I
crossed over into MiddleMiddleage last May; most of the others still have
a few years to go, though, damn them) we didn't really remember who'd
come up with which neat notion. Indeed, over at least a 22-year period
before the untimely and intensely lamented death of Jon Postel, he and I
had frequent conversations trying to reconstruct the origins of a number
of neat notions and we almost never succeeded, even on many of the ones I
was fairly sure had been his (which, in fact, was most of them). And
before the 'Net became big business, it was fairly easy for us to shrug
it off; things had worked out, and what did it matter whether he, or I,
or Gary, or even one of the BBN guys -- who always seemed to get to write
the histories and hence always seemed to have claimed to have invented
everything, anyway, perhaps because BBN was the only
"for-profit" to furnish key members of the original Network
Working Group -- had actually been the first to enunciate an idea that
was almost always implicit in the discussion to begin with?<br><br>
Now, however, there seems to be at least some celebrity value attached to
that sort of thing, if not indeed some financial value. There might even
just possibly be a minute amount of value to be attached to
"historical accuracy", or "intellectual integrity",
or some other hopelessly pre-GenX abstraction, but it would doubtless be
a tactical error to espouse that sort of thing. Besides, as indicated,
some of the current claims stick in my craw, and Peter did ask me to
"write something" and didn't get at all specific as to what,
so...<br><br>
Let's start with the one I'm in fact quite certain I was the inventor of,
especially because I can't recall which of the BBN guys is claiming it
and so I can put off the delicate question of whether I want to name
names for a while longer: "anonymous login". I remember pretty
clearly, despite being somewhat unsure as to who the other person in the
conversation was (Dirk, maybe?), being at SRI for some sort of meeting
sometime around 1973 and being told that "the NIC" (or at least
Jake [=Elizabeth Feinler - PHS]) was worried about this idea to put the
RFCs on-line, because they'd have to establish all sorts of accounts so
people could FTP them. "That's easy," I said, "just use my
NETML trick." By which I meant, and went on to explain, that just as
I'd had to propound a conventional universal "dummy" id and
password so that netmail (as we'd called it when we were inventing it,
but I'll get to that soon enough) could work via FTP without causing
grave harm to the security (and accounting) mechanisms of at least some
of the Hosts (mainly Multics, of course, since I was the Multics Network
Technical Liaison at the time), all the NIC needed to do was establish a
single, known account everybody could use to slurp the RFC's from.
"'guest' would be a perfectly fine id," I went on, "and
the password should be 'anonymous', since we'd gain some measure of
security in that people'd have to know how to spell it and of course not
everybody does." Or words very close to that, and to exactly that
effect, even if I actually gave the id and password values in the reverse
order. [The NETML trick was enunciated in RFC 491, in case you care --
and in case it ever gets scanned in so you can care. -- MAP]<br><br>
Now, EarlyMiddleAge Memory (EMAM) being what it was, and MiddleMiddleAge
Memory (MMAM) being what it is, naturally I don't recall whether I read
that one of the BBN guys was laying claim to "anonymous login"
the other year or saw it on one of those overly-coy little
"courses" PBS (the P is for Pious, I like to observe) has taken
to showing, before I decided they annoyed me so much I won't watch any
more. (Even if I were on one? Irrelevant question. I didn't get rich, nor
did I get my claims to've invented things into "the literature"
early enough, because my company didn't get commissioned to write the
"First 10 Years" report and wind up being visited first by the
Internet history book writers.) But I submit that anybody who knows me
knows that the crack about security has to be one of mine, and MMAM
insists that whoever was laying the claim gave it as his own, which makes
me suspect that the charitable explanation of parallel evolution doesn't
apply and it was either his EMAM in play or just plain theft of
intellectual property. Fortunately, anonymous login isn't really anything
to be proud of -- especially since it was exploited for a famous security
breach when it was misimplemented on a certain highly-popular Host type
-- so I can rise above. <br><br>
reprinted by permission of the author<br>
/signed/ The Author<br><br>
[the reference to peter should be obvious; the reference to gary alludes
to gary grossman, who was mentioned in the preceding paragraph, which i
omitted because it depended on the paragraph that preceded it and i
didn't want to make this even longer]<br><br>
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cheers, map<br><br>
[whose shoulder problems caused him to break down some time ago and
create a 'signature' file to apologize for the lack of his formerly
customary e-volubility -- and who's been employing shiftless typing for a
long time now to spare his wristsnfingers, in case you didn't know ...
and who's further broken down and done
http://www.lafn.org/~ba213/mapstuff.html , rather
grudgingly]</font></body>
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