FTP is 50 years old • Hacker News Board

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#71

Post by cpr » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

Fun trivia: in the early days of the ARPAnet, mail was delivered (at least on PDP-10's) by FTP-appending a message in to the receipients mailbox file. (Which was protected as append-only to world (owner, group, world).)

Didn't last long, obviously, but that was back in the days when every site had a well-publicized guest login and you could telnet anywhere. (Well, OK, in 1972 there were only a few dozen nodes, but there were some really interesting ones to play with.)

We used to play a game with telnet from HARV-10 where we'd telnet-chain around the world until someone dropped the connection or it got too slow.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#72

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#73

Post by kypro » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

Not that I think we should go back, but I do miss the wildwest days of web development when it was still acceptable to FTP untested code straight to production.

For my first dev job we would develop on production using an FTP client to push up changes on save. One day I was writing an SQL UPDATE statement and I forgot to include a WHERE clause. I basically nuked the entire product DB and it took days to recover because it was also not unheard of to not have regular db back ups. No one really questioned it too much though. Stuff like that just happened from time to time back then.

I rarely ever use FTP today. I wonder if students learning to code today even know what FTP is? It was one of the first things I learnt when learning to build websites as a teenager, but I don't that's the case anymore.

It's kind of interesting how processes in tech have evolved as much as the technology over the last few decades. It's hard to think of a good usecase for FTP anymore, but just a couple of decades ago it was used everywhere. Is anyone still using it for anything?

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#74

Post by teddyh » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

outside1234 wrote: post #60

jbverschoor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought a byte ment “by eight” What’s a nibble of a byte is 8bits

A nibble is half a byte or 4 bits.

That’s “nybble”: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/N/nybble.html

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#75

Post by gnfargbl » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #13

ajb wrote: post #6

From 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.

I believe that option was more to do with transparently converting between DOS and Unix line terminators. I definitely recall several ruined 2400bps modem downloads in the mid-nineties, because I'd failed to issue a TYPE I command.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#76

Post by teddyh » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

chasil wrote: post #58

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #38

It's been about a decade since I've used ftp. I'm trying to remember if there is anything it provides that sftp/scp does not? I remember the egress ports being a pain, and encrypting the traffic required ssl certs and being even more of a pain.

The FTP protocol has support for this: $ /usr/bin/ftp ftp> help Commands may be abbreviated. Commands are: ...proxy... While I've never been able to make that work correctly, it supposedly allows transfers between two remote hosts (all cleartext of course). The logins work, but the gets and puts don't. It didn't seem worth the time to set up, and similar functionality has been added to SSH file transfer. The SITE com…

> allows transfers between two remote hosts

That’s commonly known as “FXP”, and has been disabled for security reasons on all modern platforms.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#77

Post by formercoder » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

kypro wrote: post #73

Not that I think we should go back, but I do miss the wildwest days of web development when it was still acceptable to FTP untested code straight to production. For my first dev job we would develop on production using an FTP client to push up changes on save. One day I was writing an SQL UPDATE statement and I forgot to include a WHERE clause. I basically nuked the entire product DB and it took days to recover becau…

Don’t worry, SFTP is the backbone of the US financial system.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#78

Post by gkop » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

okl wrote: post #68

gkop wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, the handy word for an 8-bit byte is “octet” (I have not observed octet used in the software industry, only in school. Don’t use it at work or you might come across as an ass...) I was curious and searched HN and found this 2012 comment explaining octet is essentially an anachronism, as bytes have been standardized at 8 bits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4649528 . Feeling old!

> By the way, the handy word for an 8-bit byte is “octet” (I have not observed octet used in the software industry, only in school. Don’t use it at work or you might come across as an ass...) I see it used (and use it myself) from time to time in contexts where you want to differentiate between 7/8/9-bit bytes, mostly when working with embedded/low-level software.

Thanks. My application layer bias is showing. We will always need octet in the low-level networking domain, huh.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#79

Post by kstrauser » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

paxswill wrote: post #70

okl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the way, the handy word for an 8-bit byte is “octet” (I have not observed octet used in the software industry, only in school. Don’t use it at work or you might come across as an ass...) I see it used (and use it myself) from time to time in contexts where you want to differentiate between 7/8/9-bit bytes, mostly when working with embedded/low-level software.

The place I see it most is in networking RFCs.

Beat me to it. "Octet" is used in a lot of networking documentation, and it also nicely decouples wire formats from any meaning the host system might have for the information. From IP's point of view, an octet is literally that: a bag of 8 bits, without meaning. It's not part of a floating point number, or a UTF character, or anything else but just plain undifferentiated data.

Re: FTP is 50 years old

#80

Post by dcminter » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

stephvd wrote: post #40

Nice, thanks for sharing this! Sometimes I forget 50 years doesn't refer to the 50s or 60s anymore :)

On reading the headline my first thought was "wow, FTP is way older than I expected" and when I realised it's not, my second thought was: "damn, I'm old..." :)