What's the oldest protocol that's still regularly used?
Snail-mail ain't dead yet.
I believe Semaphore predates it
FTP is 50 years old
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Re: FTP is 50 years old
#12What's the oldest protocol that's still regularly used?
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Re: FTP is 50 years old
#13From rfc801 (transition from NCP to TCP/IP) : "FTP: This is specified in RFC 765. It is very similar to the FTP used with the NCP. The primary differences are that in addition to the changes for Telnet, that the data channel is limited to 8-bit bytes so FTP features to use other transmission byte sizes are eliminated." So FTP is older than the standardisation of byte size :-)
I feel like 7-bit mode stuck around for a while. I remember seeing the option in modern FTP clients.
Re: FTP is 50 years old
#14What's the oldest protocol that's still regularly used?
Interesting question and I guess it depends what you mean by "protocol"[1]. If simple characters-over-the-wire counts, then ASCII was developed throughout 60s and was itself derived from much older telegraph standards. Teletype is arguably more of a "protocol" and is actually even older, going back to the 50s, and arguably the 30s in some form, and still forms the basis of all terminal computing today including (especially) across networks.
[1] Sometimes it seems like every interesting discussion boils down to definitions, doesn't it?
Re: FTP is 50 years old
#15What's the oldest protocol that's still regularly used?
That depends on how you define "protocol". ASCII dates from 1963, and that's still the baseline for text-based protocols. FTP predates Ethernet, Token Ring and ARCNET. It predates TCP/IP. For an actual protocol, and not just a simple format specification like ASCII, it doesn't get older than that in current use.
Morse would be older.
Re: FTP is 50 years old
#16What's the oldest protocol that's still regularly used?
Re: FTP is 50 years old
#17The worst part is not that its 50 years old. The worst part is that some places still INSIST on using it. For instance I have to deal with FOTA and it's a pain.
I had a finance-industry client require we upload to their FTP server because they couldn't trust downloading the file over HTTPS from our server with a secure/unique URL.
Re: FTP is 50 years old
#18What's the oldest protocol that's still regularly used?
That depends on how you define "protocol". ASCII dates from 1963, and that's still the baseline for text-based protocols. FTP predates Ethernet, Token Ring and ARCNET. It predates TCP/IP. For an actual protocol, and not just a simple format specification like ASCII, it doesn't get older than that in current use.
ASCII is a very obvious format. If you take the english alphabet and symbols, it fits almost perfectly in the first 7 bits. In 5th grade I tried encoding English in binary, and noticed how I accidentally reinvented ASCII.
Re: FTP is 50 years old
#19So, do we still have to give our email to enter in Anonymous mode? And can we use PASV?
Re: FTP is 50 years old
#20One of my first real internet experiences was downloading random crap via FTP from WSMR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel)