> From: Paul Ruizendaal
>> the ambiguous phrase "had the first implementation of FTP", which
>> has been flagged as needing clarification
> From RFC 354 ... and from RFC 414
Those are NCP FTP, a slightly different protocol, and implementation, from TCP
FTP. (The code from the NCP one was sometimes recycled into the TCP one; see
e.g.:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/sysnet/ftpu.161
which has both in one program.)
These RFC's you listed are obviously pre-TCP; the first TCP RFC is
RFC-675. (The first RFC that even mentions TCP seems to be RFC-661.) RFC's
are all NCP-related until around #700 or so, when the mix starts to change.
Maybe the "needing clarification" refers to these two different FTP's? Without
an explicit classifier, does that text refer to NCP FTP or TCP FTP?
Noel
> From: Bakul Shah
> He was part of NSFNet, so could have got first FTP on NSFnet or a
> later version of FTP.
You all are talking about _two separate FTP's_ (as I pointed out
previously). If you all would stop confusing yourselves, you'd be able to sort
out the bogons.
In this particular case, the NSFnet appeared at a _much_ later stage of the
growth of the Internet (yes, it is spelled with a capital 'I'; the morons at
the AP were not aware that 'internet' was a pre-existing word with a
_different meaning_) than when Dave was working with the Fuzzball, and by that
point there were _many_ TCP FTP's (e.g. the ITS one I previously sent the URL
to the source for), so the 'first FTP on NSFnet' is a non-concept.
The best bet for accurate data is to look at the TCP meeting minutes from the
IEN series:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien-index.html
Looking quickly, the first one that Dave appears in might be IEN-160,
"Internet Meeting Notes -- 7-8-9 October 1980". (He wasn't in the "Attendees"
lists of any of the earlier ones I looked at.) Look in the "Status Reports"
sections to see if he says anything about where he's at. The one for this one
says:
"Dave described the configuration of equipment at COMSAT which consists of a
number of small hosts, mainly LSI-11s. ... COMSAT has also used NIFTP to
transmit files between their hosts and ISIE. The NIFTP software was provided
by UCL. ... COMSAT plans to .. arrange a permanent connection to the ARPANET."
I have no idea what a "NIFTP" might be. Also, there is a reason that serious
historians prefer contemporary written records, not people's memories.
Noel
> 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.txthttps://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
Dave Mills, of fuzzball and ntp fame, one time U Delaware died on the 17th
of January.
He was an interesting, entertaining, prolific and rather idosyncratic
emailer. Witty and informative.
G
What is the best public, unambiguous, non-YouTube reference I can cite for
the late David Mills' initial FTP work?
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. But Wikipedia's guidelines discourage YouTube-only citations,
and the text in the interview seems insufficiently detailed to have
citation value.
What is the best reference I can cite?
Thanks!
--
Royce
Hi Lennart,
At 2024-01-18T15:45:55+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote:
> Quoth John Gardner:
> > Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working with
> > the latest release of SimH, so that's kind of stalled my ability to develop
> > something in K&R-friendly C.
>
> I went ahead and write a little C/A/T-to-later-troff-output converter in
> v7-friendly and C89-conforming C:
>
> https://git.sr.ht/~humm/catdit
This is an exciting prospect but I can't actually see anything there.
I get an error.
"401 Unauthorized
You don't have the necessary permissions to access this page. Index"
> I’m not confident in having got the details of spacing right (Is that
> 55-unit offset when switching font sizes correct?)
I've never heard of this C/A/T feature/wart before. Huh.
> and the character codes emitted are still those of the C/A/T,
> resulting in the wrong glyphs being used.
The codes should probably be remapped by default, with a command-line
option to restore the original ones. I would of course recommend
writing out 'C' commands with groff special character names.
> I created the attached document like this:
>
> v7$ troff -t /usr/man/man0/title >title.cat
> host$ catdit <title.cat | dpost -F. -Tcat >title.ps
>
> (Where do the two blank pages at the end come from?)
Good question; we may need to rouse a C/A/T expert.
> PS: Branden, for rougher results, if you happen to have a Tektronix
> 4014 at hand (like the one emulated by XTerm), you can use that to
> look at v7 troff’s output. Tell your SIMH to pass control bytes
> through and run troff -t | tc.
I'd love to, just please make your repo available to the public. :)
Regards,
Branden
John Gardner wrote:
> I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface
> authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive
> scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work.
Are you offering to donate your labor in terms of typeface design, or
will it be a type of deal where the community will need to collectively
pitch in money to cover the cost of you doing it professionally?
In either case, the "C/A/T-printed document" of most value to this
project would be the same one G. Branden Robinson is referring to:
> If you don't have my scan of CSTR #54 (1976), which helpfully dumps all
> of the glyphs in the faces used by the Bell Labs CSRC C/A/T-4, let me
> know and I'll send it along. I won't vouch for its high quality but it
> should be comprehensive with respect to coverage.
The paper in question is Nroff/Troff User's Manual by Joseph F. Ossanna,
dated 1976-10-11, which was indeed also CSTR #54. The document is 33
pages long in its original form, and page 31 out of the 33 is the most
interesting one for the purpose of font recreation: it is the page that
exhibits all 4 fonts of 102 characters each. Here are the few published
scans I am aware of:
1) Page 245 of:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seven…
2) Page 235 of:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seven…
3) Page 239 of:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manu…
4) Page 499 of:
https://archive.org/details/uum-supplement-4.2bsd
Question to Branden: the scan you are referring to as "my scan", how
does it compare to the 4 I just linked above? If your scan has better
quality than all 4 versions I linked above, can you please make it
public?
M~
> All, I got this e-mail from Holger a while back. Somehow it went into
> a folder and has lurked unseen for way too long.
>
> Does anybody know any more about PCS Unix and, if so, where should
> I place the code that Holger has donated into the Unix Archive?
I don’t know much about PCS Unix, but I did come across many references to Newcastle Connection (and Unix United) when researching early networking and the various approaches to giving early Unix a networking API. I think there is no other set of surviving sources for this. Maybe Holger disagrees, but I would say that PCS Unix is best placed in the “Early networking” section.
By the way, for those interested, here is a start to read up on Unix United: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_Connection
To some extent, it is similar to the “RIDE” software developed at Bell Labs Naperville by Priscilla Lu and to S/F Unix developed by GWR Luderer at Murray Hill. As far as I know the sources for both of those have been lost to time, afaik.
Hi again John,
> I only meant "professional" insofar as aptitude with graphics is concerned.
> I won't accept money; I'm offering my labour out of love for typography,
> computer history and its preservation, and of course, the technology that
> got Unix the funding it needed to revolutionise computing. In any case,
> there's no actual "design" work involved: it's literally just tracing
> existing shapes to recreate an existing design. I do stuff like this
> <https://github.com/file-icons/icons#why-request-an-icon-cant-i-submit-a-pr>
> for *fun*, for crying out loud.
Sounds great! If you are indeed serious about trying to recreate the
ancient C/A/T character set in PostScript fonts (or some other font
format that can be converted into a form that can be downloaded into a
genuine PostScript printer), I'll try to find some time to produce the
following:
1) A set of C/A/T binary files corresponding to that CSTR #54 manual,
as well as BWK's troff tutorial which usually follows right after in
book compilations. This step is simply a matter of running the original
troff executable (with -t option) on the original source files for
these docs - but since I actually run an OS that still includes that
original version of troff and you said you don't, it would probably be
easier for me to produce and publish these files.
2) A converter tool from C/A/T binary codes to PostScript, using
whatever fonts you give it. I'll test it initially using the set of
fonts which I developed for my 4.3BSD-Quasijarus pstroff - all
characters will be there, all positioning will come from original
troff, but it won't look pretty because most PS native font characters
don't match those of C/A/T. Then as you progress with your font
drawing project, you should be able to substitute your fonts instead
of mine, and see how the output improves.
> Nice! The more material I have, the merrier. As for the scan that Branden
> and I were referring to, I've uploaded a copy to Dropbox
Using pdfimages utility with -list option, I compared the image format
and resolution in various scans I described in my previous mail, plus
this new one you just shared, and concluded that the best quality is
contained in these two:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/UNIX_Programmers_Manual_Seven…http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/7th_Edition/VA-004A_UNIX_Programmers_Manu…
Here are extracted PNG images of just the relevant page from both PDFs:
https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-sri.pnghttps://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/troff/cstr54-fontpage-ucb.png
Each PNG is a lossless extract from the corresponding PDF, made with
pdfimages utility. Each image is described as being 600x600 DPI in
PDF metadata, and the print is said to be in 12 point - numbers for
converting from pixels to .001m units in font reconstruction...
M~
Hi John,
At 2024-01-18T00:43:41+1100, John Gardner wrote:
> I'm a professional graphic designer with access to commercial typeface
> authoring software. Send me the highest-quality and most comprehensive
> scans of a C/A/T-printed document, and I'll get to work.
If you don't have my scan of CSTR #54 (1976), which helpfully dumps all
of the glyphs in the faces used by the Bell Labs CSRC C/A/T-4, let me
know and I'll send it along. I won't vouch for its high quality but it
should be comprehensive with respect to coverage.
> Thanks for reminding me, Branden. :) I've yet to get V7 Unix working
> with the latest release of SimH,
Let me know in private mail where you got stuck. Maybe I can help.
> I'm still up for this, assuming you've not already started.
No, I haven't--perhaps because I am an Ada fanboy, the prospect of
coding in pre-standard C and its mission to turn anything that can be
lexically analyzed into _some_ sequence of machine instructions has not
stoked my excitement.
(Which isn't to say that one _can't_ write safe code using K&R C; my
fear is that having to remember all of the things the compiler won't do
for you would overwhelm the task at hand. Too bad Unix V7 didn't have
Perl, since this is basically a text transformation problem.)
Regards,
Branden