Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!decwrl!ucbvax!A.ISI.EDU!PADLIPSKY
From: PADLIPSKY@A.ISI.EDU (Michael Padlipsky)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: looking for old dusty RFCs & working on anonymous FTP RFC
Message-ID: <12617471875.36.PADLIPSKY@A.ISI.EDU>
Date: 28 Aug 90 20:03:04 GMT
References: <59164@bbn.BBN.COM>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 22

Bob--

What a relief.  Here all these years I'd been feeling vaguely guilty about
"Anonymous FTP", having gotten the impression somewhere along the line that
one of the TENEX jocks at the NIC had done it as a generalization of the
USER NETML, PASS NETML trick I'd invented in RFC 491 to let netmail be
"free" but still accounted for, and now I find you willing to take the blame--
er, uh, credit.  (I could still swear the line about anybody who could spell
"anonymous" was OK was one of mine, though.)

One thing does bother me: if you had the anonymous trick in the arsenal at
the time, why didn't you make "sndmsg" try it when it got the "You must
login first" code from Multics's Server FTP, instead of making me go off
and come up with RFC 491?  Not that I'm disputing your "priority" to the
invention of Anonymous FTP, of course, just wondering.  (I think the timing's
off for you to have been the one who generalized the canned-account-for-mail
gambit if you were using anonymous for EARLY debugging, so presumably it
wasn't the case that anonymous wasn't in the arsenal at the time and I'm
still off the hook.)

cheers, map
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