FTP

File Transfer Protocol

Born of FTP¹

The FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a way to transfer and download files from a user’s machine to an other. The principal problem in early '70 was how standardize a universal code for, of course, transfer file. This concept was born officially on 16 april of 1971 when Abhay Bhushan, an indian professor that worked in MIT, published his research about File Transfer Protocol. In his text, available on this link², he defines two categories of computers network: direct and indirect. The first one “implies that you, the network user, are "logged" into a remote host and use it as a local user”, an user can do that with a interface like a terminal or a computer.

Indirect computer

The indirect computer network doesn’t require a log in or a knowledge in specific remote systems, in fact “you need only know a standard set of network file transfer commands for your local system in order to utilize remote file system.” Basically it was possible remotely send file, store it and in a second moment take it back and also run program into network computer. It’s important to understand that in the ’71 the pc doesn’t exit and the computer are few, moreover also the thinking way was difference. People though that computer must be a big piece of electronics located fear away and connect wiht a console that can interact wiht it; by the way the real computer user in the ’70 were basically informatics and professors. So in others word FTP was created for connect users and servers in order to create an advance network system.

RFC

Professor Bhushan create a new RFC (request file comment) to standardize his FTP, that was called RFC 114; it is a set of unequivocably instructions to connect to network based on ASCII. The goal was make easy connection to servers for every user and spread this technology for create a web of interaction with network.

Lots of improvements were made in the early 70’ about RFC, the 172 provided a user-level oriented protocol for file transfer between host computers. RFC 265, 281 and 294, January ’72, came later. New efficiently RFC was the 354 and then 385. The 414 provided a status reports report on working server. Then a enormous numbers of new request for comment followed, you can find a list onWikipedia. In August of 1973 RFC 542 became the “official” one. Then an other important improvement was RFC 765, new formal standard for modern FTP. Some revisions ware added with RFC 959 in October 1985. It has lots of new commands and it is considerate the new standard RFC.