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Happy Birthday: FTP turns 40 today
This specification was later replaced by RFC 765 (June 1980) and RFC 959 (October 1985). It's remarkable that the current version has not changed for over 25 years. There are several proposed standards that improve on RFC 959. RFC 2228 (June 1997) proposes security extensions and RFC 2428 (September 1998) adds support for IPv6 and defines a new type of passive mode.
FTP became popular since it required a minimum of handshaking, and was tolerant of temporary interruptions, making it very useful for long file transfer sessions. As alternatives became more and more easy to use though, FTP's adoption decreased. FTP is still used as an internal business solution to sharing large files. Because it so outdated, however, it is rarely used to easily allow external parties to access confidential information that is too large to send by email.
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 – many applications still use it in the background for certain tasks – was years ago when I was trying to pirate something with my friends. FTP isn't really useful for piracy anymore and unless it's upgraded, it will die a slow death as alternatives continue to take over. Do you still use FTP, and if so, for what?
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User Comments (8)
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Guest
on April 16, 2011 12:51 PM |
Happy birthday FTP! Do I still use it today? A decade ago, it was all rave for me, upping all my GIFs, HTML pages, CGI scripts, etc to my personal website's host via FTP. Oh well, in the age of Facebook and Twitter, many wouldn't really care about how to access and download from FTPs. |
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Cota
on April 16, 2011 1:37 PM |
wow thats really old, i wonder if it is the most old technology in the world of computers that is still in use?, well anyway its time to make that prostate exam :P |
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Ahmed90
on April 16, 2011 1:37 PM |
happy Bday :P FTP now is for servers/web masters only for easy access and fast file controll for normal downloads HTTP or FTP it doesn't matter anymore same speed same time same work |
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Mizzou
on April 16, 2011 1:50 PM |
There's no way that I'm going to admit how old I was when ftp first came out, let's just say that I also used gopher and mosaic. |
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Julio Franco
on April 16, 2011 2:36 PM |
I'm not a server expert but I understand that using plain FTP in the open today is overkill due to security reasons. A decade ago the issue didn't seem that imminent but now SFTP or SSH must be used instead. |
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Quinneypoo
on April 16, 2011 5:08 PM |
I use FTP to transfer games onto my PS3 harddrive. |
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Per Hansson
on April 17, 2011 7:43 AM |
I use FTP to update a small file repository I use when linking stuff online. I also routinely use FTP when updating or modifying my Dreambox satellite receiver. I can recommend WinSCP for usage with FTP transfers, it is free and also (obviously) supports the secure SSH file transfer mode SCP which is obviously preferred over FTP for security reasons... |
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Tedster
on April 17, 2011 8:51 PM |
ah, the late nights with my atari 800xl and a dial up modem using FTP to get games from underground BBS systems. |
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