Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SCORE.STANFORD.EDU!VAF
From: VAF@SCORE.STANFORD.EDU (Vince Fuller)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: TENEX mode
Message-ID: <12469707096.33.VAF@Score.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 11 Feb 89 03:46:53 GMT
References: <WANCHO.12469460754.BABYL@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 46


        (I'd be more in favor of dropping TENEX mode from FTP.)

    I hope you were just being flippant, but I saw no smiley there...  So,
    lest someone might take that comment seriously, let's make it clear
    that TENEX is just an alias for TYPE L 8 (not TYPE L 32, please!).
    But, if you really are seriously suggesting to drop TYPE L 8, then we
    have a problem.  How else can you send bytes from one machine
    architecture to another?  Certainly TYPE I (image) isn't a universal
    solution, even between machines of the same word size and operating
    system!

There's some confusion here as to what "TENEX mode" in FTP means. Back in the
old days, when the majority of ARPANET (pre-Internet) systems were TENEX's and
TOPS-20's, a means was devised for doing transparent file copying between such
systems. This became known as "TENEX mode", and is a actually a combination of:

    TYPE L 36	(36-bit packing of the bytestream)
    STRU P	("Paged" structure)
    MODE S	("Stream" mode - actually this doesn't really matter)

In more recent times, the UNIX FTP client started calling TYPE L 8 "TENEX
mode", probably because it's the type of transfer used to retrieve a class of
shareware that is kept on a certain, popular TOPS-20 host.

In any case, I believe Barry is proposing the drop the original "TENEX mode"
from the FTP spec, not to drop TYPE L 8. I suppose this would consistant with
the philosophy that FTP should only implement the least-common-denominator of
pushing bits around and is sort of moot anyway, since the only machines that
implement this are not likely to hang around for more than a few more years.

Why not just make all non-interoperable FTP operations subject to the "SITE"
command? That's what it's there for. Why not "SITE VMS MODE RMSFILE", or
something like that? This will make implementation of "intermediary" machines
to store system-specific filetype difficult, but it will solve the immediate
problem of how to get systems running a common OS to transfer files that are
native to that OS.

	--Vince

(P.S. The only reason I know about the two definitions of "TENEX mode" is
 through experiencing similar confusion when someone asked me, onece the
 de facto TOPS-20 FTP maintainer, about "TENEX mode" on UNIX systems -
 "TENEX mode on UNIX systems??" I was a little surprised to hear about such
 a thing until it was explained to me what the speaker meant by "TENEX mode")
-------