[rickcarlino]

Gnutella is a mild obsession for me. The way that the protocol was designed and also the way that it saw a mainstream adoption has always fascinated me. For anyone reading this thread who is curious, I wrote a functional client this year for fun: https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/

[gonesilent]

It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.

[threeio]

I remember the early gnutella releases and we'd use the search history as a chatroom for the first like 24 hours before it got too saturated ;)

[rickcarlino]

Have you blogged about this or written it down? I would love to hear more about this piece of history and it seems that the history is slowly fading.

[gonesilent]

Napster came along to the nullsoft channel one day and shared the app he was working on. We all played with it and offered suggestions. Told him he was be sued out of existence. From that came gnutella and waste. Something was spun out with me and friends as infrasearch and sold to sun. Wilson Sonsini did a good thing on peer-to-peer back in the day too. They were our lawyers. Sucked us dry.

[abhiyerra]

Oh man infrasearch. With Gene Kan right? Was trying to revive xcf at Berkeley with some friends.

[gonesilent]

Yes, Gene, Justin, Shawn all somewhat knew one another. Street raced and hung out online. I started infrasearch with Gene. He also did an open source shoutcast server.