You ought to see the kind of file-access methods I had to use when
I first started. Oh, FTP was available, for certain things through the TCP/IP networks, but not all places I might wish to link to from my Uni
were that. X25, or something... And I've been racking my brains for what we had to use to transfer files... Something to do with a frog or a toad...
Had to quickly go out before I could post this message, and just as I arrived back, I remembered... KERMIT.
(That and ZMODEM, which I also remember... And remember always having to look up the manual,
every time... Must not have used that enough.)
Anyway, anonymous (and not-so-anonymous) FTP is still alive and well, from what I've seen, although generally as an "ftp://..." URI in a browser or within a programme's own internal update-seeking mechanism[1], these days, and undoubtedly swamped by seemingly more direct "http://" prefixed file accesses, and thus probably unnoticed by the average Web2.0/Smartphone-generation member, even when they
do end up using it.
[1] Well, when I've run a packet sniffer, for one reason or another, this is generally what
certain programs still use... I've also seen write-only (semi-)anonymous FTP services in use for report-backs...