Happy Birthday: FTP turns 40 today

File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the standard network protocol used to copy a file from host to another over a TCP-based network, is 40 years elderly today. It was originally written by Abhay Bhushan as the RFC 114 specification on April 16, 1971.

This specification was later replaced by RFC 765 (June 1980) & RFC 959 (October 1985). It is outstanding that the current version has not changed for over 25 years. There's several proposed standards that improve on RFC 959. RFC 2228 (June 1997) proposes security extensions & RFC 2428 (September 1998) adds support for IPv6 & defines a brand new type of passive mode.

Personally, I still use FTP to update a website I maintain for a club. Other than that though, the last time I consciously used FTP a plenty of applications still use it in the background for definite tasks a was years ago when I was two times trying to pirate something with my friends. FTP is not useful for piracy anymore & unless it is upgraded, it will die a slow death as options continue to take over. Do you still use FTP, & if so, for what?

FTP became popular since it necessary a maximum of handshaking, & was tolerant of temporary interruptions, making it very useful for long file transfer sessions. As options became increasingly simple to make use of though, FTP's adoption decreased. FTP is still used as an internal business solution to sharing huge files. Because it so outdated, however, it is seldom used to basically permit outside parties to access confidential information that is huge to send by e mail.