From: Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>
To: "tuhs@tuhs.org" <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Mills' initial implementation of FTP - best citation?
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2024 18:04:28 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CF97CAE9-0014-451E-9070-C7072956CB1E@iitbombay.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7B9EBFA7-C16A-4109-BDB1-B26D7E9DE5AF@planet.nl>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1740 bytes --]
On Jan 22, 2024, at 8:15 AM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:
>
>> I see that the wording on his Wikipedia page has the ambiguous phrase "had
>> the first implementation of FTP", which has been flagged as needing
>> clarification, so I intend to provide it.
>>
>> In both this interview:
>>
>> https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113899/oh403dlm.pdf
>>
>> ... and this video recording of Mills himself giving a lecture at UDel:
>>
>> https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?t=428
>>
>> ... it's quite clear that it's literally true - he authored, compiled,
>> installed, implemented, and tested the very first (and apparently second)
>> FTP server.
>
> It may be impossible to provide hard evidence. From RFC 354 it seems to me that the protocol took on a recognisable shape around July 1972 and from RFC 414 it seems to me that there were a number of implementations by November 1972, and unfortunately Dave Mills is not mentioned. His recollection may well be correct, but finding proof he was the first in a 4 months time slot 50+ years ago may be too ambitious.
>
> https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc354.txt
> https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc414.txt
>
> Maybe the internet history list can shed some more light on the matter:
>
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
I asked Abhay Bhushan (author of the above two RFCs) and he had this to say:
Dave Mills recently honored was not part of FTP development and specifications. Many groups were implementing early versions of FTP, so I don't know who got it working first. It was not Dave as he joined the Arpanet community later. He was part of NSFNet, so could have got first FTP on NSFnet or a laterversion of FTP.
FYI.
[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2345 bytes --]
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-01-23 2:05 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-01-22 16:15 Paul Ruizendaal
2024-01-23 2:04 ` Bakul Shah [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2024-01-23 4:39 Noel Chiappa
2024-01-23 5:19 ` George Michaelson
2024-01-22 21:29 Noel Chiappa
2024-01-23 13:36 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2024-01-22 7:41 [TUHS] " Royce Williams
2024-01-22 12:53 ` [TUHS] " Marc Donner
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=CF97CAE9-0014-451E-9070-C7072956CB1E@iitbombay.org \
--to=bakul@iitbombay.org \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).