[ih] History of Anonymous FTP

[Wayne Hathaway]

In 1972, I implemented an early version of the FTP protocol on the TSS/360 system at NASA Ames.  Because I felt it might be interesting to others to document some of the issues that arose and how I got around them, I wrote RFC 418, "Server File Transfer Under TSS/360 at NASA-Ames Research Cenrer."  I just pulled that RFC up to remind myself how I handled anonymous, and was a little surprised to see that the word appears nowhere in the RFC!  I did define three userids ARPA, ARPA1, and ARPA2 so users could access files without having their own userids added, but any concept of anonymous FTP doesn't seem to have existed in 1972.  Interesting.



On Tue, 28 Sep 2021 20:09:40 -0700, Dave Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>> The history of the Web usually has citations to work such as Engelbarts,
>> for its conceptual history. And that's entirely reasonable. But that
>> system was not a widely distributed set of independent operations.
>>
>> So I always point to Anonymous FTP as the operational base, for the
>> model. We relied on it for roughly 20 years, before gopher and the web
>> gave us improved choices.
>>
>> But I don't remember the details of when Anonymous FTP came into
>> service. Just did a quick search and didn't find anything helpful.
>>
>> Perhaps this group knows some relevant details?
>>
>> d/
>> --
>> Dave Crocker
>> Brandenburg InternetWorking
>> bbiw.net
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
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