[ih] FTP RIP

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 28-Sep-20 14:29, Joseph Touch via Internet-history wrote:
> This thread begs the question of where we’d be had TBL had tried to leverage FTP rather than reinventing the wheel with HTTP.
> 
> I recall an early interview that claimed the rationale was that FTP opened two connections for every transfer and he only wanted one. It’s been unfortunate how many of FTP’s features had to be (or still remain to be) reinvented in HTTP.

To be clear, he decided to use telnet as the basis for HTTP, which was one step better than using UDP I guess. His day job at the time was supporting RPC usage by physics experiments, and definitely envisaged HTTP as an RPC-like operation but without the expensive machinery needed for safe atomic operations. That's how we got RESTfulness, which any well-educated computer scientist is horrified by.

My computer has forgotten how to do telnet, but for many years you could telnet to port 80 on an HTTP server and get something sensible back.

   Brian