Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ucsd!usc!bbn.com!clements From: clements@bbn.com (Bob Clements) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: looking for old dusty RFCs & working on anonymous FTP RFC Summary: I confess, I did it. Message-ID: <59164@bbn.BBN.COM> Date: 27 Aug 90 16:49:35 GMT References: Sender: news@bbn.com Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 44 emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes: >What I'm trying to do is to gather historical material for an RFC >on anonymous FTP. RFC 959 doesn't talk about where the convention >of specifying "anonymous" as a password comes from, nor was there >anything that I could easily dredge up in any other RFC that I have >found. To the best of my knowledge, I invented the use of "anonymous" as a username (not as a password). This was in the FTP server for TENEX in the NCP (pre-TCP) days. Probably late in 1972. The implementation was simple. You could read (or write) any file that was world-readable (writable) in the file system. The server logged all transactions, for both anonymous and "real" users. It logged the passwords used by "anonymous", which were supposed to be real user idents so one could contact the user if he was having problems. There was a configuration file and there had to actually be a username "anonymous" in the system password file, otherwise the FTP feature was disabled. So sites that didn't like the idea didn't need to have it turned on. This was largely as a debugging and testing aid. Us early FTP implementors could test against each other's implementations without needing to actually get a password on every machine. (Machines weren't all Unixes in those days, so there were lots of implementations and lots of word lengths and lots of file types.) Other users found it useful, too, so we left it in. Another feature added in that version was a "NUL" device. Reading from it gave you a megabit of data, for speed testing. In those days there were only a half dozen sites on the ARPANET and security was not a big problem. We joked that anyone who could spell "anonymous" was probably OK. A simpler time. >--Ed >Edward Vielmetti, U of Michigan math dept >moderator, comp.archives Bob Clements, K1BC, clements@bbn.com (w) 617-873-3612