File
Snarf
Protocol.
A
file transfer protocol similar to
FTP which was popular in the late 1980's and early 1990's. At the time, most users of
The Internet were connected via
universities or
companies. Putting up a file on an
anonymous FTP server required getting a fair amount of authorisation, which not everyone was willing or capable of getting. Also, as always, not all file transfers are legal -- and institutions care about those matters!
FSP was used mainly to transfer material, getting around these limitations. Having a high port number for the protocol was important (UN*X machines won't let a non-root process listen on a port with number <1024). For a while, FSP sites proliferated as a source for everything the institutions didn't want on the Internet, whether rightly or wrongly.