FTP history
Dave Crocker <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.ietf.idn |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
At 12:43 PM 5/27/2002 -0400, John C Klensin wrote: > While FTP apparently lends itself to "direct UI", it >was never intended that way. John, I have a pretty clear recollection that when FTP first came out the folks who wrote the spec honestly expected to be able to sit at a TIP, telnet over to an FTP server, and type commands that would effect file transfers. I even have a vague recollection that this was used to send data to a printer attached to the TIP on another port. >For example, use of "TYPE ASCII" transfers requires translation >between the character set of the sender and network ASCII and >translation by the receiver from network ASCII to local >character set and formats. Not if the receiver can process network ASCII directly, as some did. > Even when those hosts use ASCII, the >translations must accomodate, e.g., conversion of end of line >conventions. Not if they supported CRLF directly, as some did. In fact, that was why CRLF was chosen and end of line, rather than a single character. A single character would have made lexical analysis notably simpler. >But the protocol is no more designed as a "direct UI" than SMTP SMTP came around 10 years later. However, the original MAIL command in FTP was explicitly intended to permit direct typing over a telnet connection. And it was in fact used that way. (That was why there was a distinction between MAIL and MLFL which did the data transfer over a separate FTP data connection.) d/ ---------- Dave Crocker <mailto:[email protected]> TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com> tel +1.408.246.8253; fax +1.408.850.1850