At 07:31 PM 1/31/2001 +0700, you wrote:
>Don't bet on it.   FTP is one of the very very ancient protocols (much
>older than SMTP (e-mail) for example), when it was first invented, almost
>no-one had even heard of unix.
>
>It is quite likely (well, possible anyway) that on the systems that
>were in use, the possibility of treating a directory as if it were a
>file had never been considered.

Are you sure?  Unix isn't a spring chicken itself; in fact, Bell Labs' 1st
Edition is just as old as the first RFC, and the Berkeley Standard
Distribution predated RFC-765 by a few years.  I had always thought the
RFC's and the Internet evolved along with Unix, often by the same groups of
people.

-----------------------
Trevin Beattie          "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,
trevin@xmission.com     for you are crunchy and good with ketchup."
      {:->                                     --unknown