FTP, first created in 1971, alive and well in service-oriented world
Lorraine Lawson put together some insights on old reliable file transfer protocol (FTP), noting that it continues to play a key role in SOA and cloud-based infrastructures.
FTP was first designed back in 1971, before TCP and IP even existed. The current specification was created in 1985.
She quotes Frank Kenney, formerly one of Gartner's go-to gurus in the SOA space, and now vice president of global strategy for Ipswitch File Transfer:
"Sixty to 70 percent of the data that’s just flowing around your company is in these large batch files, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, flat files, mp3s, video files – I mean you're talking about upwards of 70 percent of what you move day in and day out are these types of files. The only type of technology that’s really optimized to be able to move them around in a way that you can track and trace and still have a high degree of performance is managed file transfer, then manage file transfer technology becomes one of the logical solutions to brokering the conversations in between the cloud and the company."
No doubt the original creators of FTP would have no idea how far their protocol would go in the world.