Oral history:
First torrent was uploaded circa 2002 by Bram Cohen's brother. It was a video of his metal band playing live.<p>But BitTorrent really took off when redhat played this dirty trick: their distro was free to distribute but you had to pay to download it. (free as in free speech, not as in free beer). Bram paid to download it and made it available with BitTorrent. The torrent of the iso kept running for more than a year with thousands of downloads. BitTorrent was alive.<p>Soon BitTorrent represented 30% of all internet traffic and was the primary reason to get xDSL internet access.<p>Before writing BitTorrent, Bram worked on a project named mojonation, when released it was slashdotted and didn't stand the load. Bram learned from this experiment and wrote BitTorrent in ~6 months.<p>(source: I met Bram Cohen + p2phackers mailing list)
I still remember sites like SuprNova.org and later mininova sites that were some of the first public Bittorrent sites I discovered.<p>Although before that I was a heavy Emule and Kazaa user, and I also remember WinMX fondly (the only place where I could find PDFs of Game Developers Magazine, in the early 2000s). While most of my friends where pirating MP3s, I was hungry for PDFs, books and the like.
I uploaded this in 2005 and you can still download it today: <a href="https://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=3306963" rel="nofollow">https://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=3306963</a> - enjoy some good mp3 music.<p>And thanks the lonely seeder - I wonder who you are, but you are awesome, besides having impeccable taste in music. That's the Internet I love, sharing is caring.
> A Harvard student had yet to start writing the first lines of code on a new idea, called “TheFacebook”. YouTube wasn’t around yet either, and the same was true for the smartphones that dominate people’s lives today.<p>> At the time, all popular entertainment was consumed offline. People interested in watching a movie could use the Internet to buy a DVD at one of the early webshops, or sign up with Netflix, which shipped discs through the mail. However, on-demand access was simply not a thing. At least, not legally.<p>Is there a word for this trend of dumb journalism? Where subject matters are explained in dumb and "relatable" terms, except it's totally unneeded on a website literally called torrentfreak, full of subject matter experts?<p>That's like posting an article on the basics of boiling water in a culinary institute's newsletter for seasoned chefs.<p>I guess it must be for the SEO word count?