· 4 min read
A brief history of fast file transfer (1971 — 2025)
FTP turned 54 this year. The story of how we got from RFC 114 to UDP-based congestion control running on Cloudflare's edge is shorter, weirder, and more reproducible than most people think.
· 5 min read
FTP is dead. Here's what to use instead.
FTP was specified in 1971 — six years before TCP. SFTP doesn't fix the underlying problem. Here's the protocol-level reason both fall apart on long-haul links, and what the modern alternatives actually do.