It begins in the early 1980s. While the ARPANET was evolving into the internet, engineers needed a way to move files between machines that had no hard drives and very little memory. Thus, the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) was born. It was defined in 1981’s RFC 783. It was "trivial" for a reason: it had no authentication, no encryption, and no directory browsing. It was a dumb pipe—a digital forklift that picked up a file and put it down elsewhere.
Created by Philippe Jounin, this is the favorite of embedded engineers. It is a single .exe under 500KB that acts as a TFTP, DHCP, SNTP, and Syslog server simultaneously.
Fast forward to the era of Windows dominance.