[ih] WWW dates

[Mike Padlipsky]

At 08:58 AM 10/7/2006, Dave Crocker wrote:
>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.

funny you should mention that.

from

"And They Argued All Night..."



...over whose claim was right: first at which, and for what, and with whom.

                                 M.A. Padlipsky
                                <map at multicians.org>
                         Copyright © 2000 by the author.

[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]:

[...]  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?

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...

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]

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.

reprinted by permission of the author
/signed/ The Author

[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]


cheers, map

[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] 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20061007/7847e19e/attachment.htm>