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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correction: 1 guy + 1 gal, not 2 guys. Joyce K. Reynolds was a woman. :-)
Was?
She used to be a woman. She still is, but she used to, too.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqHA5CIL0fg
More seriously, she passed away in 2015:
I’m more surprised that there is an ssh.com. And that it looks like it was put together with a bad corporate WordPress template.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. He asked IANA, which was literally 2 guys in a room back in the 90's. Literally anyone could get a port assigned in those days, just like anyone could get a /24 address block.
Correction: 1 guy + 1 gal, not 2 guys. Joyce K. Reynolds was a woman. :-)
Personally I find how/why FTP uses two ports, 20 and 21, to be more interesting: So the first thing to know is the FTP is 'old', in that it predates TCP and originally ran on NCP: > The original specification for the File Transfer Protocol was written by Abhay Bhushan and published as RFC 114 on 16 April 1971. Until 1980, FTP ran on NCP, the predecessor of TCP/IP.[2] The protocol was later replaced by a TCP/IP versio…
Or for simplexity's sake!
From the previous discussion of SSH port 22:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178993
Back in the "bad old days" of the simplex NCP protocol, before the full duplex TCP/IP protocol legalized same-sex network connections, connect and listen sockets had gender defined by their parity, and all connections were required to use sockets with different parity gender (one even and the other odd -- I can't remember which was which, or if it even mattered -- they just had to be different). The act of trying to connect an even socket to another even socket, or an odd socket to another odd socket, was considered a "peculiar error" called "homosocketuality", which was strictly forbidden by internet protocols, and mandatory "heterosocketuality" was called the "Anita Bryant feature".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program
http://www.saildart.org/IMPSER.DOC[SS,SYS]
When the error code is zero, the next 8 bit byte
is the Stanford peculiar error code, followed by
72 bits of the ailing command returned. Here are
the Stanford error codes. [...]
IGN 3 Illegal Gender (Anita Bryant feature--sockets
must be heterosocketual, ie. odd to even and even
to odd) [...]
Illegal gender in RFC, host hhh/iii, link 0
The host is trying to engage us in homosocketuality.
Since this is against the laws of God and ARPA, we
naturally refuse to consent to it.
; Try to initiate connection
loginj:
init log,17
sixbit /IMP/
0
jrst noinit
setzm conecb
setom conecb+lsloc
move ac3,hostno
movem ac3,conecb+hloc
setom conecb+wfloc
movei ac3,40
movem ac3,conecb+bsloc
move ac3,consck
trnn ac3,1
jrst gayskt ; only heterosocketuals can win!
movem ac3,conecb+fsloc
mtape log,[
=15
byte (6) 2,24,0,7,7
] ; Time out CLS, RFNM, RFC, and INPut
[...]
gayskt: outstr [asciz/Homosocketuality is prohibited (the Anita Bryant feature)
/]
ife rsexec,exit 1,
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, Telnet was originally port 1 and FTP was port 3 (RFC 433, December 1972). On an incompatible protocol change (mentioned in RFC 542, August 1973), they were "temporarily" moved to 23 and 21 respectively until the old versions were taken down. Of course, the move back to 1 and 3 never happened. Wouldn't FTP need three simplex connections - commands to server, responses from server, data transfer?
FTP puts data and commands on the same socket. This is perfectly doable in NCP.
Not on TCP it doesn't. And some of the Arpanet FTP RFCs refer to separate connections as well, e.g. for the MAIL and MLFL commands which send email over the command and data connections, respectively. (SMTP didn't exist yet so mail was sent over FTP.)
Having born much later in the history of Internet, I think I have missed out on many of the early magical years of the Internet.
But if I can get involved in some other technology that is in early stage and booming and where I have a chance to contribute something that may become a de-facto standard 10 years from now, that's something I will be very interested to invest my time on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've written a lot of TCP deep-packet inspection code, including parsing FTP control protocol. So I was surprised by this post by Robert Graham: https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/08/hacker-jeopardy-wrong-ans... - FTP control protocol follows the specification for Telnet.
You might find the MUD community interesting in this regard, as they've built de facto standards for 16-bit color encoding, text compression, hidden sideband metadata communication usable by clients, and even simple embedded HTML and image rendering all on top of telnet. On top of that, because of the wildly varying capabilities of MUD clients, every single feature has to be totally backwards-compatible with a plain…