Happy Birthday, Gnutella: Pioneering P2P Protocol Turns Ten

Justin Frankel is my hero. I learned so much programming from his releases. I remember having a fully printed and annotated copy of the Waste source code.

He is one of those extremely rare programmers of the "too smart to need unit tests" type and he can come up with paradigm shifting code by hacking on something in a weekend.

All his utilities were fully dependency free, straight up C code that compiled something epic into a 50kb executable. Back in the day I had a job which paid a substantial bonus for every kilobyte that I managed to shave off the executable binary size ( 14.4 baud modem days ) and his code as well as all the code from the 4k and 64k demo scene that was available was my only reference material.

I lost track of what he is up to these days, but I hope he found much happiness after the apparently tough AOL time.

Those were the days. I remember how there used to be so many arguments and petty battles about which protocol or extension to use, and all the incompatible clients and how one client maker would add an extension that would break other clients. There were so many vested interests, including the music industry giants who also had their internal clients being developed.

And the bittorrent came and overtook all of them pretty quickly.

The file-sharing scene looked calm from the outside, but on the inside the wars and the intrigues were vicious.