[TUHS] Re: Mills' initial implementation of FTP - best citation?

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Bakul Shah

    > He was part of NSFNet, so could have got first FTP on NSFnet or a
    > later version of FTP.

You all are talking about _two separate FTP's_ (as I pointed out
previously). If you all would stop confusing yourselves, you'd be able to sort
out the bogons.

In this particular case, the NSFnet appeared at a _much_ later stage of the
growth of the Internet (yes, it is spelled with a capital 'I'; the morons at
the AP were not aware that 'internet' was a pre-existing word with a
_different meaning_) than when Dave was working with the Fuzzball, and by that
point there were _many_ TCP FTP's (e.g. the ITS one I previously sent the URL
to the source for), so the 'first FTP on NSFnet' is a non-concept.

The best bet for accurate data is to look at the TCP meeting minutes from the
IEN series:

    https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien-index.html

Looking quickly, the first one that Dave appears in might be IEN-160,
"Internet Meeting Notes -- 7-8-9 October 1980". (He wasn't in the "Attendees"
lists of any of the earlier ones I looked at.) Look in the "Status Reports"
sections to see if he says anything about where he's at. The one for this one
says:

  "Dave described the configuration of equipment at COMSAT which consists of a
  number of small hosts, mainly LSI-11s. ... COMSAT has also used NIFTP to
  transmit files between their hosts and ISIE.  The NIFTP software was provided
  by UCL. ... COMSAT plans to .. arrange a permanent connection to the ARPANET."

I have no idea what a "NIFTP" might be. Also, there is a reason that serious
historians prefer contemporary written records, not people's memories.

	   Noel