Dirac Formulation of Free Open String

Dirac formulation of open relativistic strings as systems with constraints is made explicitly. Classical theory is given in the standard light-cone and covariant center-of-mass gauges. It is mentioned that the well-known result D = 26 is affected by using the standard quantization of the mutually independent nonphysical boson creation and annihilation operators. It is shown that in the Dirac formulation these operators are not independent in both the gauges. We give some new conditions on these operators and show that the theory is consistent with Poincare algebra in any dimension D. (author)