3+hours? I remember being able to download roughly 10 songs in an hour.
https://computer.howstuffworks.com/kazaa.htm
KaZaA didn't store the files itself so it was thought they wouldn't be possible to shutdown. From the site above:
"While Kazaa claims to be "completely legal," there are those who disagree: The free-to-download blue files are controlled by Kazaa users and include copyrighted content."
"Later that year, Kazaa was sued again, this time in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPAA). As of February 2005, the decision in that suit is still pending."
I remember they started suing individual users at that time... I found an article explaining that:
https://www.videoproc.com/resource/what-happened-to-kazaa.ht...
"In September 2003, the RIAA filed lawsuits against over 250 individuals, accusing them of illegally distributing about 1,000 copyright music files each, using P2P networks. RIAA sought an average compensation of $3,000 per case."
The result of the first case:
"In July 2006, the MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. caused Sharman to settle for $100 million, the amount to compensate the loss of four major music labels – EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music. The company also agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the studios in the industry."
It's unclear exactly how Kazaa got down, the article concludes with "In August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active."... "the rise of legal streaming services such as iTunes, Spotify, and Netflix further compounded Kazaa's demise.".
Looks like the music industry managed to scare people away from pirating instead of actually succeeding in bringing them down directly, which is more or less what I remember.
Gnutella brought peer-to-peer searches. Basically it used a flood-fill algorithm: your search would be broadcast to all connected peers, which would broadcast it to all peers that hadn't seen it yet, until somebody responded with the file and their IP and you could download directly from them. Interestingly Ethereum uses basically the same algorithm for block distribution, with some optimizations that were first published by RTM, who was one of the founders of YCombinator.
Kazaa's innovation was to split the peer space into "ordinary nodes" and "superpeers", with the observation that not all bandwidth links were equal. It would enlist hosts on high-bandwidth connections to form quasi-centralized indexing nodes to organize the network topology for all the low-bandwidth consumer nodes. It's a similar principle to how the Lightning Network works for Bitcoin, or how L2s on Ethereum operate. This also made it easier to shutdown than Gnutella though, because being a superpeer made you a legal target for the RIAA.
Kazaa and ed2k were distributed. I think ed2k is still viable.
By capitalizing on the oft unused upload bandwidth, Napster provided a benefit at little cost.
Would be fascinated to hear what this looked like on the PSTN backend load side, ~2000.
A bit earlier than 2000 /g https://lineofsightgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/phon...
I don't think so, asymmetry was the innovation that made 56K possible on POTS (plain old telephone sevice, with only enough bandwidth for squawky voice)
I'm curious about the nuances, but it seems like the last mile download/upload imbalance was created by the originating signal mode?
Download = First mile internet to ISP could be upgraded to digital, and thus grab some extra throughout by avoiding analog noise handling
Upload = First mile user to ISP was inherently analog over phone lines, and so sacrificed throughput for line noise tolerance
v.90 didn't work at all between two regular POTS-connected analog modems. In order for a v.90 connection to happen, the ISP-end of the connection needed to be a digital circuit (typically using ISDN PRI).
By being digital, the gear at the ISP-end was able to precisely and distinctly control each individual bits that would ultimately be converted to analog at a point that was physically near to the user (their local CO switch). This was what gave us asymmetric nature of "56k" v.90.
Eventually, we got good enough at learning how to handle changing line conditions and thereby twiddle the bits with a modicum of precision in the upstream direction. This allowed us to produce a standard with a bit more symmetry: v.92.
v.92 offered up to "56k" (~53k due to FCC limits) down, and 48k up.
A lot of users -- at least in the US -- never experienced v.92. It wasn't formalized until right around the turn of the century, which corresponded well with the time when xDSL, DOCSIS, and/or BRI started showing up even in fairly small not-completely-rural communities at fairly reasonable prices. The local dialup ISP market was beginning to die by then and many never bothered with upgrading their gear to support v.92 before they closed their doors for good.
(All of this wacky dial-up modem tech was both enabled and limited by digital switching in the PSTN. Speeds over dry-pair phone lines could be far higher if there wasn't a digital conversion in the middle, and avoiding that digital conversion is how DSL became possible.
Which is interesting: A DSL circuit was meant to go only across town (ish), and was always betwixt two fixed points. But a point-to-point v.90 or v.92 connection could be established to any properly-equipped machine by just dialing its phone number, and that machine could be across town or on the other side of a continent; it didn't care.)
The later v.92 spec supported a digital upstream and could hit 48k upload.
Regardless, dialup users did not have a lot of upstream bandwidth available. They also suffered through high packet loss and latency making their throughput even lower than their line speed would suggest.
It was 1995 and pretty magical to get CD-quality audio coming out of the computer, though.