[ih] FTP Design

[Paul Vixie]

On 2012-07-01 4:05 AM, John Day wrote:
> Re: [ih] FTP Design
> Dave you are being too much the engineer and not enough the
> historian.  ;-)  I want the intellectual history of arriving at the
> concepts in Telnet.
>
> How did the ideas come about?
>
> If Bernie is right (and I assume he is), and his name is not on that
> paper (and it isn't), then it can not possibly answer the question I
> am asking.  ;-)

so, i am not dave, and i was only a kid when this was going on, but i
have a rimshot.

the idea of symmetrical negotiation, do/don't, will/won't, is so
obviously right that it feels like a gear meshing with other gears. it
was the right thing to do, requiring only that some brilliant person
unpolluted by complicated or proprietary ways of thinking, start from
first principles, and hammer out the details.

in that it reminds me of IP, TCP, and SMTP. (not not IP6 or DNS or FTP
or HTTP.)

"how did the ideas come about?" in this example made me think of a
hegelian trichotomy. "because it was the right context to beget this."
litmus test: "will the historians all say that the right person was
finally in the right place at the right time to cause one era to end and
the next to begin."

it's not a great dictum for daily living but it does seem to fit a lot
of the early "internet" work to a "t".

paul
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