[TUHS] Mills' initial implementation of FTP - best citation?

[Bakul Shah]

On Jan 22, 2024, at 8:15 AM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:
> 
>> I see that the wording on his Wikipedia page has the ambiguous phrase "had
>> the first implementation of FTP", which has been flagged as needing
>> clarification, so I intend to provide it.
>> 
>> In both this interview:
>> 
>> https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113899/oh403dlm.pdf
>> 
>> ... and this video recording of Mills himself giving a lecture at UDel:
>> 
>> https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?t=428
>> 
>> ... it's quite clear that it's literally true - he authored, compiled,
>> installed, implemented, and tested the very first (and apparently second)
>> FTP server.
> 
> It may be impossible to provide hard evidence. From RFC 354 it seems to me that the protocol took on a recognisable shape around July 1972 and from RFC 414 it seems to me that there were a number of implementations by November 1972, and unfortunately Dave Mills is not mentioned. His recollection may well be correct, but finding proof he was the first in a 4 months time slot 50+ years ago may be too ambitious.
> 
> https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc354.txt
> https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc414.txt
> 
> Maybe the internet history list can shed some more light on the matter:
> 
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

I asked Abhay Bhushan (author of the above two RFCs) and he had this to say:

Dave Mills recently honored was not part of FTP development and specifications.  Many groups were implementing early versions of FTP, so I don't know who got it working first. It was not Dave as he joined the Arpanet community later. He was part of NSFNet, so could have got first FTP on NSFnet or a laterversion of FTP.

FYI.
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