Telnet, a TCP application for remote login, was developed between 1969 and 1971 and was the first application developed for packet-switching. Telnet, like FTP, is also a message transfer protocol. A telnet connection is a TCP connection used to transmit data with interspersed (in-band) control information. Rather than being limited to transferring files, a telnet login session appears to the user as a virtual terminal directly attached to a remote computer. However, telnet does not directly provide file system interaction between local and remote computers.