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

George Michaelson ggm at algebras.org
Tue Jan 23 15:19:22 AEST 2024


NIFTP was the UK Coloured book File Transfer Protocol. The JANET X.25
based comms stack which included different coloured fasicles for each
applications protocol. If memory serves me right NIFTP was grey book
but I'd have to go and check.

I worked on Yorkbox, the LSI-11 based X.25 system which had a UNIX
applications suite connected to X25 by a DR11-W link. I did
applications level bugfixes, I completely bolloxed it up, probably
wrecked the York University IPR in this project, pissed off my project
partners at least one of whom left because I was such a crap coder.
Happy days. Later on I worked at UCL at the end of the SATNET era when
Bob Braden wrote up the project:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1035237.1035286

Funny story: UCL was very unhappy with my ex-employer York Uni because
they had coded the LSI-11 work and then lost the contract to maintain
it. They kept operating a gateway from JANET to ARPANET which required
use of fiddly kermit logins to get from a PAD X.25 login into a system
to send real FTP commands, and there was a translator to take NIFTP
command streams and somehow gateway them into FTP like in JCL (there
was another applications stack in coloured. book for real JCL which
was coded at Bristol uni if I recall correctly)

BTW Noel is right that written reports outweigh faulty memory every
time. But my memory of what a bad job I did continues to haunt me.


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