Defining a generation: The audio cassette turns 50 today

The audio cassette is now officially “over the hill” as it was 50 years ago today when the format launched at Philips' headquarters in Amsterdam. Originally designed to replace reel-to-reel tape for dictation, the audio cassette ultimately became a household staple for those that grew up in the 80s.

Tucked snugly between the days of the 8-track and the compact disc, the audio cassette helped to define a generation. Outstanding audio quality was never attributed to cassettes – in fact, they degraded in quality the more you listened to them and it wasn’t uncommon for a cassette player to “eat” your tape.

A number of advancements like Dolby noise reduction, better magnetic oxides and higher-quality tape players did help to make matters a bit better but it still wasn’t enough by most standards. So then, what was so great about cassettes? One word – versatility.

Back in the 80s, you couldn’t just hop online and craft a playlist of your favorite songs. Instead, you’d have to sit by your stereo system and manually record songs from the radio. This required a bit of precision, patience and a lot of free time but as someone that did it countless times, I can attest that it was well worth it.

Cassettes have long since given way to digital media but they aren’t completely dead. That’s right, some metal bands and “hipsters” are attempting to revive the platform although it’s not likely to reach the level of success enjoyed in the 80s.

Happy Birthday: FTP turns 40 today

File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a TCP-based network, is 40 years old today. It was originally written by Abhay Bhushan as the RFC 114 specification on April 16, 1971.

This specification was later replaced by RFC 765 (June 1980) and RFC 959 (October 1985). It's remarkable that the current version has not changed for over 25 years. There are several proposed standards that improve on RFC 959. RFC 2228 (June 1997) proposes security extensions and RFC 2428 (September 1998) adds support for IPv6 and defines a new type of passive mode.

FTP became popular since it required a minimum of handshaking, and was tolerant of temporary interruptions, making it very useful for long file transfer sessions. As alternatives became more and more easy to use though, FTP's adoption decreased. FTP is still used as an internal business solution to sharing large files. Because it so outdated, however, it is rarely used to easily allow external parties to access confidential information that is too large to send by email.

Personally, I still use FTP to update a website I maintain for a club. Other than that though, the last time I consciously used FTP – many applications still use it in the background for certain tasks – was years ago when I was trying to pirate something with my friends. FTP isn't really useful for piracy anymore and unless it's upgraded, it will die a slow death as alternatives continue to take over. Do you still use FTP, and if so, for what?