The History of File-Sharing

Two decades ago 3.5″ disks were the most sought afterwards medium to distribute files. Then, their massive 1.4 MB file size was more than enough to distribute files. However things got as a matter of fact interesting when people started to swap files on the Internet.

The BBS, or Bulletin Board System, has been largely attributed with the beginning of contemporary digital filesharing. Beginning with the Hayes Smartmodem, Bulletin Board Systems became automatic enough that Sysops were able to own and operate these mediums from their own homes as both a hobby and, later, as a business. Typically, the BBS was nearly like an intranet in which users would dial-in with their modems to read/send messages, access news, and most importantly for us, share files.

Soon afterwards, the underground filesharing scene gave birth to an intricate private network of FTP sites known as Topsites. These networks were based on invite only systems and adopted many of the features of Usenet.

Of course, due to the private and closed nature of this distribution network, it was difficult for many users to gain access to these topsites. Topsites are very much however in existence today.

Through DCC, and later with advancements and bots known as XDCC servers, filesharing took but another turn. Distribution groups who were able to get their hands on releases were able to serve files to the masses using these XDCC servers, which were typically hosted anywhere from powerful machines, brute forced Windows NT computers, personal computers, and university computer labs.

The whole quite popular

XDCC is on the whole quite popular and a quick search through Netsplit.de shows many active channels across many active IRC networks nevertheless utilizing XDCC for distribution. Additionally, IRC is notwithstanding widely used for its original purpose of chat as then as a bootstrap mechanism for filesharing mediums which sprouted later.

For a brief period Hotline was a very popular medium for sharing files. With the naked eye, Hotline was very mainstream with many mega corporations participating in the Hotline network. Nevertheless, it quickly faded away due to many complications, including however not limited to the encrypting of source files on Hotline computers which in substance crippled the company.

Napster arguably brought MP3 and filesharing to the masses. There are very few netizens who haven’t used or heard of Napster. The software operated as a peer to peer filesharing network strictly used for music. Napster’s database, but, was centrally located, which in the end helped lead to its shutdown and subsequent demise. After all, not earlier it helped to spread the idea of filesharing, as a whole, to the masses.

Gnutella, originally created by the Nullsoft people, was once the most used network thanks to LimeWire. The LimeWire client was sued by the RIAA and shutdown in 2010, which turned Gnutella into a ghost network. The original eDonkey2000 from Jed McCaleb was toppled as so then, nevertheless clones have kept the eDonkey network alive. The Kazaa team later created Skype, which is a widely used VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)/IM platform.

DC++ and i2hub were popular methods of sharing files in closed-networks. Both were highly used within the university and college scene where students would share hub/server addresses with each other in order to share files at very high speeds within the local college networks. The advantages provided within these was that outside agencies and other various third parties could not access the content found within these networks.

Bram Cohen created BitTorrent, which nearly anyone with an Internet connection today has used, knowingly or not. BitTorrent in essence took on all of the greatest properties of its predecessors and packed them all into one, easy to use file sharing platform.

Research is good

Filesharing as a research is good. Let’s make sure it stays around so that we may continue to share our thoughts, ideas, and art in order to better ourselves, our communities, and our earth. Anyone who is against that must anyway you look at it dream of world destruction, or at the least, wish for human progress to stop.

Andrew is a long-time advocate of privacy and the conservation of the personal realm. He served as the brand manager for an internationally recognized best-selling product prior to co-founding Private Internet Access. Additionally, he co-founded of Mt. Gox Live which was acquired by Mt. Gox, the world’s leading Bitcoin exchange, and created their official mobile application.