Miscellaneous

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Proposed by ANSI in 1963 and finalized in 1968, ASCII ("ask-key") is the world-wide standard for character set encodings. It uses 7 bits to store 128 symbols with an 8th bit used for parity (error checking). the extended ASCII set uses 8 bits, adding another 128 symbols. Symbols include non-printing characters, such as a bell sound, letters, numbers, foreign language characters, drawing symbols, and other glyphs.
If you mistakenly download a program, like a game, in ASCII mode, and it does not work properly, then you will need to download the file again in either Binary or Automatic transfer mode.

Binary

Binary literally means "having 2 parts".

As a base-2 numbering system it contains only 2 digits, "0" and "1". Computers use binary because they can store information in terms of electrical signals either being absent/off (0) or present/on (1).

When computers store data that is not meant to be interpreted through a character set (like ASCII), that data is refered to as "binary" data and stored in 8 bit bytes. Transmitting binary data as ASCII data can result in data loss or corruption.

Finding FTP sites

Many companies and web sites also have FTP sites as well. Although there is no guaranteed way to know the proper FTP address without asking the company or finding the address on a web site, many sites follow a loose set of naming standards.

All ftp addresses are prefixed with "ftp://". This tells the client application to use the FTP protocol.

Many sites use "ftp" as a subdomain for their ftp sites. e.g. "ftp.mydomain.com" or "ftp://ftp.mydomain.com". See below for a few examples of FTP sites you can visit.

FTP Site Owner/Provider Site Address Port

Microsoft ftp.microsoft.com 21

Adobe ftp.adobe.com 21

Netscape ftp.netscape.com 21

Sun ftp.sun.com 21

Electronic Arts ftp.ea.com 21

* Note: FTP addresses are subject to change without notice.

Related Topics

[ Table of Contents ] - [ Index ] - [ Introduction to ALFTP ]