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

[Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl>]

> On 22 Jan 2024, at 22:29, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> Maybe the "needing clarification" refers to these two different FTP's? Without
> an explicit classifier, does that text refer to NCP FTP or TCP FTP?
> 
> 	Noel

That is a good point. I looked at a longer section of his talk and indeed the FTP reference is part of his discussion the NCP->TCP transition. Here it becomes easier to find references to support the claim.

The strongest one that I could find is in the TCP-IP Digest mailing list from that era. The first issue has a summary of what is already out there and David Mills work is mentioned:

https://jaist-g.dl.sourceforge.jp/pub/RFC/museum/tcp-ip-digest/tcp-ip-digest.v1n1.1

====
COMSAT

   Date:  30 Apr 1980
   From:  Dave Mills <Mills@ISIE>

   1. The TCP/IP implementation here runs in an LSI-11 with a homegrown 
   operating system compatible in most respects to RT-11. Besides the 
   TCP/IP levels the system includes many of the common high-level 
   protocols used in the ARPANET community, such as TELNET, FTP and 
   XNET.
=====

Although this date precedes the date of the RFC by a few months, I do believe that it is correct and not a typo. For example, IEN-194 (July 1981) discusses the system from a perspective of experience, not of recently completed code.

All that said, I wonder if “doing the first FTP” is a true reflection of his contribution in this era. After all, porting NCP FTP to TCP FTP is not all that big a deal (see for instance https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP/src/ftp). Maybe the sentence on Wikipedia should say that beyond NTP, he was an important contributor to several other early internet protocols.