Dude, Where’s My File? FTP Automation Lessons from the Father of FTP
At the risk of sounding a bit too American-centric, the question came up the other day, who is the George Washington of FTP? The father of FTP so to speak.
It turns out that distinction falls to Abhay Bhushan, who authored the original RFC 114 in the near-ancient days of 1971 while at MIT and proved that a GE645 could transfer a file to a PDP-10, or in reverse. And it could do so without users at either system knowing the operating system commands of the other system. He thought, modestly, that there might be interest in being able to remotely access files on a "foreign" computer. Abhay achieved accessibility by developing a proposed common protocol that he made known to each computing platform that moved some simple ASCII files around. Thus the File Transfer Protocol was born.
Circuit board from Bell Labs GE-645
This is not meant to be a walk down a dusty computer museum hallway, but rather a testimonial that from humble beginnings (ok, maybe not so humble, MIT, deployment on ARPANET, etc.) sprang one of the most ubiquitous and oft-times mission-critical fusions of technology with money-making/saving business processes. Namely, your business partner has a file, you want it (or he wants yours), you both have access to the Internet, and you need to get the file ASAP, and (most likely) in a secure manner.
Now if you only have one business partner, or you only do the file transfer once-in-a-blue-moon, it's as simple as the file being placed on an FTP server connected to the Internet, logging in via the FTP client and requesting that the file be transferred. But what if you have dozens or hundreds of business partners, you are both sending and receiving, and need to do so multiple times a day; or have critical business processing that needs to occur based on updates to a target file or even on the value of the contents within the file? More often than not, this is the reality of the situation, which is acerbated by the ever growing popularity of FTP (and its younger, more sophisticated cousin, AS2).
How popular is FTP? It's difficult to gauge as FTP transmissions occur in numbers too large to track (and there is no central party invested in doing that tracking). However, one such measure is the number of Anonymous FTP sites, which are typically used for C2C file sharing (anyone want a pirated MP3 file?). The count of these sites at the end of 2003 as reported at www.ftp-sites.org was well over 6,000 independent sites. This does not count the thousands of commercial B2C or B2B sites where secure, guaranteed transfers are required (not to mention entire businesses built around FTP, like our partner GlobalSCAPE). Businesses thirst for data much more than teens pine for the latest (for free) Lady Gaga tune, so it is safe to say that the 6,000 anonymous sites are dwarfed by serious commercial FTP sites.
How did we get here? The Network Effect tells us that the value of one fax machine (or one Facebook page for that matter) is zero, but the value of n-points of connectivity grows exponentially as n grows linearly. Especially when there is a piece of business critical data contained in a file half-way round the world (real-time CSI 300 Index values, for example) and you need to get it now. Dude, that's where your file is; so how do you get it, and fuse it together with your business process needs, and get (or send) maybe thousands of other files as well? FTP Automation can make the compounded effects of mushrooming FTP site transmissions less costly, quicker to market, more manageable, and with increased efficacy.
So what’s the value of two ancient minicomputers sharing a single file transmission way back in 1971? Perhaps Mr. Bhushan, the Father of FTP, said it best at the conclusion of RFC 114 when he postulated perhaps a bit too humbly: "The protocol is readily extendible."
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