FTP Software, Inc.,[1][2] was an American software company incorporated in 1986 by James van Bokkelen, John Romkey (co-author of the MIT PC/IP package), Nancy Connor, Roxanne van Bokkelen (née Ritchie), Dave Bridgham, and several other founding shareholders, who met at Toscanini's in Central Square after an email went out over the Bandykin mailing list looking for people interested in starting a company.

After Donald W. Gillies produced a full-function multi-connection TCP and compatible SMTP for his bachelor's thesis, a mail proxy,[6] it became possible to offer an FTP implementation - which requires two concurrent TCPs.

This software, known as "ntcp" (new TCP) in the source tree, could support seven connections on a 128KB IBM PC-XT, and could interoperate with ten different operating systems.

[8] When Microsoft included a TCP stack at no extra cost in Windows 95 (as has become standard with all operating systems), FTP lost a significant revenue source.

Due to management (which by that time was mostly non-founders) failing to adequately prepare for the transition into supplying network-using applications, FTP was not able meet Wall Street's expectations and its stock price declined sharply.