[ih] History of Anonymous FTP

[Darius Kazemi]

There is of course Padlipsky's anecdote (that probably won't settle
anything to anyone's satisfaction) on the invention of anonymous login for
FTP:

https://multicians.org/allnight.html

(Fifth paragraph beginning "Let's start")

On Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 8:49 PM Wayne Hathaway via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
> >> --
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> >> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> >> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
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