[ih] First file transfer on ARPANET

[Jack Haverty]

I remember an email conversation I had with one of the original ARPANET
developers, who mentioned that they moved stuff (files) from one machine to
another by quickly writing 2 very simple programs.  One would open a
connection and simply copy whatever bytes arrived into a file.  A similar
program on the "other" machine would open a connection and read from a
file, sending bytes to the other guy.   This could be done essentially from
Day One, coordinating by telephone.

Sorry, I can't remember who it was -- probably Bernie Cosell, Dave Walden,
or Ben Barker (who may all be listening even now!)

So, depending on how you want to define "first file transfer", it could
have happened very shortly after the first 2 IMPs were connected.

In addition to what the developers were doing, Kleinrock's UCLA crew were
collecting statistics from the IMPs, so they may have been doing "file
transfers" too.   Perhaps Vint remembers more about how that was done?

Of course, after Telnet and remote login were implemented, one could log in
to a remote machine and do the 2-program kind of file transfer without need
for telephones.  I suspect that kind of scenario was the precursor to the
FTP, which used a Telnet control connection to set up and use separate data
connections -- same kind of approach as the "2 simple programs" situation,
but automated.

I'd expect that the "first file transfer" was done either by the BBN
installers, or by someone in UCLA's measurements project, very soon after
the first IMPs got running, and probably well before "remote login" was
common.

/Jack
On Dec 11, 2012 9:47 PM, "Richard Bennett" <richard at bennett.com> wrote:

> Dear Historians,
>
> I'm curious about when the first file transfer was done successfully on
> ARPANET. Given that the initial focus was remote login, I'm guessing that
> rudimentary file transfers wouldn't have been done until sometime in 1970.
> Does anyone remember?
>
> Thanks,
>
> RB
>
> --
> Richard Bennett
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20121212/97e55379/attachment.htm>