The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, January 16, 2023

The other SFTP that never was

For reasons, I'm doing some research into the history of FTP when I come across an RFC for SFTP. Only this isn't the SFTP that is used today, but instead the Simple File Transfer Protocol from 1984. Unlike TFTP, it uses TCP, and unlike FTP, it only uses a single network connection.

But this bit is why I'm writing about this:

Random Access

Pro: Wouldn't it be nice if (WIBNIF) SFTP had a way of accessing parts of a file?

Con: Forget it, this is supposed to be SIMPLE file transfer. If you need random access use real FTP (oops, real FTP doesn't have random access either – invent another protocol?).

Resolution: I have not made any provision for Random Access.

That “other protocol” would take several more years to be invented, and then take over the networking world.

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