It was about 20 years ago that I was working with
CMU-TEK and TGV's
MultiNet TCP/IP packages on VMS. ISTR that there was a mode
available in the FTP client for one or both of these that I could use
with other hosts where records were used (VMS, TOPS, etc) so that I
could transfer files with the record structure intact.
FTP has a lot of facilities that nobody ever uses in today's
pointy-clicky "everything's a stream of bytes" world (which the people
who designed those into FTP would, like as not, justifiably correct to
"...stream of octets").
You might want to actually go read the spec (RFC 959, IIRC) if you care
about this stuff.
Of course, this is not to say that there wasn't some private extension
in use in the setup you saw.
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