Downloading

February 15, 2008 11:14 AM

I'm looking for a complete or brief history of downloading.

Starting out with Napster preferably, or even before if its interesting enough. The evolution of downloading, from p2p to bitorrent, etc. I'd like to see when the RIAA and the MPAA first started suing people, and when controversy really began.

If you were trying to explain the entire ordeal to a layman what would you be sure emphasize?

posted by Wanderlust88 to technology (13 comments total)

googling "darknet" will give you a lot. there are quite a few excellent essays out there on this topic, i would look around on Wired.
posted by lohmannn at 11:24 AM on February 15, 2008

If I was trying to explain the ordeal to a layman, I'd emphasize 1)the effectiveness of social-networking-style features (e.g. ban lists in Napster, ratio requirements in torrent communities) in order to encourage people to be virtuous; and 2)the arms-race aspects. Why would a layman care about ports and protocols and whatnot?

And I'd start with the jam-band tape-trading scene, or maybe Apple II-era crackers and sneakernets.
posted by box at 11:25 AM on February 15, 2008

I think what you're interested in is "file sharing;" searching that will probably be a lot more fruitful than "downloading," which goes back to Telnet days. Actually, you're interested in "Internet-based file sharing," because people have been copying intellectual property since the day after Thag decided he liked Gorg's mastodon drawing and decided to do one of his own.

I'm no authority, but the people to talk to would be old-school BBSers if you want to get down to the real roots of this. I know friends of mine were data-swapping on their Commodore 64s back in the '80s. Everything since then has just been a refinement of what the Internet does best: shove bits and bytes around the ether.
posted by Shepherd at 11:28 AM on February 15, 2008 [1 favorite]

ratio requirements in torrent communities

Uh, yeah, this goes back to the aforementioned old-school BBSs. Upload credits, etc. Bittorrent applies it on a different level, but certainly they didn't invent the concept of fairness in filesharing.

I would suggesting going old-school but mostly because I am biased and think that kids today think they invented everything. Check out BBS: The Documentary.

Because Ward Christensen has a posse.
posted by GuyZero at 11:51 AM on February 15, 2008

Oh, yes - I knew one person who was downloading MP3's before 1994 - I was definitely still in university. Napster started in '99. The music trading scene was certainly going well before that.
posted by GuyZero at 11:53 AM on February 15, 2008

I would emphasize that none of the RIAA/MPAA's court cases have been about "downloading." While they like to use this language, they have only sued people for two things: "making available" (i.e. uploading); and for hosting links to material they assert infringes their copyrights (i.e. facilitating access).

The history of P2P is a bit different and probably more germane to your point than the history of the concept of downloading as implemented on BBSes and FTP sites (and web sites, etc.), but the Wikipedia pages on P2P and Napster are good points of departure.
posted by rhizome at 11:54 AM on February 15, 2008

Here's the wikipedia article on File Sharing.
posted by Effigy2000 at 11:58 AM on February 15, 2008

And here's the Wikipedia article File Sharing Timeline.
posted by goo at 12:03 PM on February 15, 2008

GuyZero, I thought that the first MP3 encoder didn't come out until sometime in mid-94 and the name MP3 was invented like a year later... maybe your friend wasn't downloading MP3's as such?
posted by kosmonaut at 1:32 PM on February 15, 2008

Maybe GuyZero's friend was downloading .mods or .stm or .st3 or .669 or whatever...?

Ah, the good ol' BBS/sneakernet days.

Don't Copy That Floppy!
posted by porpoise at 1:43 PM on February 15, 2008

This is where I have to fess up to an unreliable memory. It may have been '97 as I also remember him talking a lot about Ultima Online. I may also have been riding a dinosaur at the time. But it was definitely MP3s from private FTP sites that he got via IRC. I recall that there weren't many MP3 players and encoders were next to impossible to find or were perhaps blatantly code stolen from Frauenhoefer.

It's not like Fanning didn't have any MP3s, he just wanted to streamline the process.

I do remember searching for pr0n on cow-orker's file shares while a co-op student as far back as '92... a fellow student who worked at Corel once found a folder full of pinup pictures of Mike Coupland's wife (the founder/CEO's wife). He copied it first, then opened the photos. Once he realized what/who they were he deleted the folder and then re-formatted the drive several times to ensure no one would be able to prove he had ever seen them. The panic in his voice as he told me the story is quite funny in retrospect. I must have had 10-20 floppies worth of R-rated photo scans. Where they came from originally I have no idea. But as with everything, pr0n was there first even before music downloads. (ignoring .mid or .mod files)
posted by GuyZero at 2:04 PM on February 15, 2008

File sharing goes back a long ways. Maybe a little less for 'copyright infringement' type things. In '87 or so you would find one FTP site that had some stuff including a list of other FTP sites and what they had and you would build a collection of FTP sites where you could find the things you wanted.... Mostly software and mostly Public Domain type stuff. Almost every FTP site had a file of other FTP sites. You browsed the hard way, and kept a list of the good ones.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:24 PM on February 15, 2008

Just to clarify: I don't mean to suggest that bittorrent communities invented the concept of fairness in filesharing--both ratio requirements and Napster ban lists are examples, not originators.
posted by box at 2:37 PM on February 15, 2008