FTP Software, Inc., was an American software company incorporated in 1986 by James van Bokkelen,

John Romkey John Romkey is an American computer scientist who along with Donald W. Gillies co-developed MIT PC/IP, the first TCP/IP stack in the industry for MS-DOS on the IBM PCTCP/IP in 1983 while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1986, Romke ...

(co-author of the MIT PC/IP package), Nancy Connor, Roxanne van Bokkelen (née Ritchie), Dave Bridgham, and several other founding shareholders, who met at Toscanini's in Central Square after an email went out over the Bandykin mailing list looking for people interested in starting a company. Their main product was PC/TCP, a full-featured, standards-compliant

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

package for

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

. The company was based in

Andover, Massachusetts Andover is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. It was Settler, settled in 1642 and incorporated in 1646."Andover" in ''Encyclopedia Britannica, The New Encyclopædia Britannica''. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 15th ed. ...

. It also had a number of offices throughout the United States and overseas. They were acquired by competitor

NetManage NetManage Inc. was a software company based in Cupertino, California, founded in 1990 by Zvi Alon, an Israeli engineer. The company's development centre was located at the MATAM technology park, in Haifa, Israel. In June 2008 the company was ac ...

in 1998.

Origins

The core open-source software was developed at MIT starting in 1982 as the PC/IP project, a project to make PCs into first-class citizens on TCP/IP networks. This project began as a Telnet implemented by Louis J. Konopelski under the supervision of

Jerome Saltzer Jerome Howard "Jerry" Saltzer (born October 9, 1939) is an American computer scientist. Career Jerry Saltzer received an ScD in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT in 1966. His dissertation Traffic Control ...

. Later contributors to the PC/IP project included

, David Bridgham, David D. Clark, and Donald W. Gillies. FTP Software was the first of many companies to name themselves after an

Internet protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. IP ...

. At the time the company was founded, the PC/IP software package was already being sold by

Wollongong Wollongong ( ; Dharawal: ''Woolyungah'') is a city located in the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. The name is believed to originate from the Dharawal language, meaning either 'five islands/clouds', 'ground near water' or 'sound ...

3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe ex ...

and others, and so some of the inventors of PC/IP decided to exploit their own product. After Donald W. Gillies produced a full-function multi-connection TCP and compatible SMTP for his bachelor's thesis, a mail proxy, it became possible to offer an FTP implementation - which requires two concurrent TCPs. This software, known as "ntcp" (new TCP) in the source tree, could support seven connections on a 128KB IBM PC-XT, and could interoperate with ten different operating systems. The multi-connection TCP languished in the source tree for two years before the FTP founders chose to make it the core of FTP Software, setting the company apart from the other competitors in this space, which were not actively improving PC/IP and were not willing to implement the FTP protocol based upon "ntcp".

Fate

Initially PC/TCP's protocol stacks and network interface drivers were linked into individual application executables, as with PC/IP. By 1990, all PC/TCP applications shared a TSR

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

, which itself (initially) used built-in network interface drivers. By 1991, John Romkey's TSR PC/TCP Packet Driver specification had largely replaced the built-in drivers. The company had a good run, with a valuation of over $1 billion at one point, but suffered greatly from both internal and external pressures. It had grown rapidly and repeatedly moved physically farther away from its roots at MIT. The founders, though technically adept, were inexperienced as managers. They suffered from in-fighting, epitomized in a public divorce between two of the founders. The company went public in 1994, and maintained profitable growth through 1995, as a dominant supplier of TCP stacks for x86-based machines. They spent two to three million dollars per year on advertising. When Microsoft included a TCP stack at no extra cost in

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

(as has become standard with all operating systems), FTP lost a significant revenue source. Due to management (which by that time was mostly non-founders) failing to adequately prepare for the transition into supplying network-using applications, FTP was not able meet Wall Street's expectations and its stock price declined sharply. In May 1996, FTP Software announced it was providing Microsoft with various technology for

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

2.0 for

Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0. Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series run as a shell on top of MS-DOS; it was the last Windows 1 ...

, including a PPP network, 16-bit email client, and other technology. In 1998, FTP Software was bought out by former rival

. The deal was controversial, with some shareholders claiming it was not in their interest since the sale price was less than the amount in FTP's bank account.

Comparison with other products

An extensive history of TCP on personal computers was published in 1998 by Steven Baker for ''Unix Review''.

Products

* InterDrive * OnNet * LanWatch * PC/BIND * PC/TCP * SNMP Tools * WinSNMP

References

External links