It was originally written by Chris Myers and Bryan D. O'Connor in Washington University in St. Louis as a replacement of the BSD FTP daemon, for use in the Washington University network, primarily the large wuarchive site.
The software eventually evolved to lend itself as a replacement in other mainstream commercial operating systems of the time, including DEC's Ultrix, IBM's AIX and Sun's SunOS and Solaris operating systems.
It was also soon ported to other operating systems rooted in open source, such as FreeBSD and Linux.
The last known release of that software was 1.3.4 before it was merged back into the WU-FTPD codebase yielding wu-ftpd-2.6.0 as a result.
Up until the early 2000s, it was the most common FTP server software in use, though its use has lessened in recent years due to availability of more feature-rich and easier-to-configure software, and primarily due to its perceived lack of security and the perceived complexity of the source code.