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JOY_OF_FTP

                                
I'm someone who typically looks askance    
at GUI interfaces, preferring depth to 
an often superficial "ease of use".      
                                     
But consider command line ftp, 
compared to the web.  

Much of what's really interesting
about the web *could* have been         And some of the cooler things,
done with ftp sites                     like the Gutenberg Project,   
                                        were being done that way      
                                        in the pre-web days.          
But look at the sheer number                                          
of things you needed to do to                           I can remember when   
follow a reference:                                     the killer-app for    
                                                        the internet was the  
Reading through a document, you come across             sfraves calendar, sent
a statement that a certain file can be found            out via email.        
on an ftp site at a certain location, via                         
"anonymous" access.              
                                 

(1)  You go into the ftp client:      
     ftp some_machine.some_university.edu

(2)   It prompts you for user name, you answer "anonymous".

(3)   It prompts you for password, you type in your email address,
                                                                  
                                          (The first time you do this          
                                          you puzzle over why it wants
                                          a password.)                
                                                                           
(4)  If you're very lucky, you *know* the location, and do a               
     cd <location>

  More likely, you need to do things like "ls" to
  see what choices you have, make guesses and cd
  up and down the tree looking for what you want.
                              
                Quite often "ls" was incredibly               
                slow... this was so bad that a customary        
                kludge developed of putting a site map on     
                the site intuitively named something like     
                "ls-lrR.txt"  (because it was the output       
                of a recursive ls command).
                                                             
                    If you knew what you were doing, you     
                    might transfer that one file first, then 
                    look at it in an editor to figure out    
                    where you should cd to.                 
                                                          
(5)   Once you're in the right place, you just do something 
      simple like "get <filename>".     

(6)  Oh, wait a minute, where is the file going to be saved?   
     Hopefully you remembered to change the *local* directory
     by doing something like "lcd /tmp".
                                
        (It took me a long time to learn about that,
        because it has no analog among the standard 
        unix commands, unlike "cd" and "ls".)
  
  Oh, and that thing you're downloading,
  it's just plain text isn't it?  Uh,
  no, actually it's *never* plain text,
  it's always a compressed tar archive.
                                               
(7)  So what you should have done, before             
     starting the download, was to use the
     command "binary", to change modes and
     tell it you're planning on                                      
     downloading something other than 7bit      (For reasons I won't 
     ASCII text.  Otherwise, it mangles          get into, this was
     the information.                            considered a slick  
                                                 feature, once).     
    Modern ftp clients have the default   
    fixed, but 'twas not so as late as the 
    mid-90s, at least not in my experience                    
                                          
  So the odds are very good you're going                             
  to need to do the transfer again.                      

    Perhaps after being very puzzled for awhile about why
    that compressed archive isn't uncompressing. 
  
(8)  Oh, and if that was something besides plain text you
     were after, e.g. a gif of an image, you were then going
     to have to feed the file name to a special veiwer.

   
So that's very loosely around 8 steps...    
And it's clunky and mistake prone enough
that you're going to need to re-do them      
pretty often, so looking at something by       
ftp might be something like a 12 step                "12 step"?
process on average.                                  No pun intended.
                                                     Yet.

   And then the web came along, 
   and all of that was replaced                     
   by a single click.                               
                                                    
   Suddenly you could browse a "docuverse" of sorts,
   without navigation getting in the way.           
                                                    

      Even a confirmed mouse-hater like
      myself had to admit that Mosaic had
      put the pieces in the right places...
                                                 
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