[ih] FTP RIP

[Dave Crocker]

On 9/28/2020 8:48 AM, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote:
> As I recall, though, the first ARPANET email transfer was accomplished 
> gloming SNDMSG & CPYNET together - to

Yes.  Well documented.  And there is a timeline and reference to 
relevant histories at http://emailhistory.net.

Broadly, there was a flurry of activity in the early 1970s, with quite a 
lot of collaboration and cross-talk.

So, almost 25 years ago I was chatting with Abhay about FTP's including 
the mail commands and he was quite clear that it had been planned all 
along.  Certainly the public documentation suggests that the topic was 
active in the midst of the flurry.

As a result of the more recent pseudo-controversy about the 'invention' 
of email, Ray said that his midnight project with sndmsg/cpynet was in 
direct response to the other email discussions that were happening, of a 
more elaborate protocol, and a usage model of printing the message and 
sending it through office paper mail.  I had not heard this piece of his 
story before.  It's perhaps a bit facile to compare what he did, against 
what was in the works, to creating Unix and reaction to Multics. But 
maybe not.

Anyhow, the earliest FTP rfc drafts don't contain email, but by the time 
the specification stabilized, it did.


> If I recall my history correctly, FTP had (has?) a "mail" command 
> added that served to transfer email for a while.  Then came SMTP. 

SMTP was written 10 years later.  And then it had to go through 
deployment startup.  The FTP Mail commands served us quite well, for 
quite awhile.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net