On Thu, 12 Sep 1991 11:52:47 -0400 (EDT), John C Klensin wrote:
There is one other historical problem with FTP implementations
(probably not the protocol), and that is that we tend to not carry
around quite enough information to describe a non-text file that is
being moved around the network. Our file descriptors have gotten a lot
more complicated than they were fifteen years ago, and FTP
implementations have not kept up.
Just a side comment; I claim that with the demise of Tenex, TOPS-20, and
Multics that file descriptors are much simpler in today's Unix-only world than
they were in the past. Think of all that FDB information, not to mention file
page tables (remember holey files?)! If you'll recall, there's a whole
section of FTP that was devoted (although it had weasel-wording to deny it) to
specifically Tenex and TOPS-20 file transfer.