The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
Downloading files with any of the conventional file transfer systems may be expensive for businesses and annoying for consumers. It loads a lot on the file server housing the file(s). Thousands of users might try to download the files at once whenever a corporation uploads fresh software into its file servers. The burden is overwhelming if the data are big, say a full CD or DVD disk. Take the 1940 U.S. census, for example, which was just published recently. Unable to manage the volume generated by thousands of genealogists seeking to download and examine the census photos, the servers slowed to a crawl.
Hardware and bandwidth to handle the load have cost many businesses tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. Regarding Microsoft’s servers used for software patch distribution, the business has spent millions of dollars on infrastructure and bandwidth required to manage updates alone.
Those businesses who neglected to invest in hardware and bandwidth found their servers crippled under strain and thousands of unhappy consumers unable to get the files they were looking for.
Bram Cohen began considering the difficulty in distributing thousands of copies of massive files. Eventually the college dropout began programming code to offer a better path. At last he called his program BitTorrent. It replaces the several file download systems that have been applied in the past. Bram hands his program away free of charge.
The file transfer protocol now makes about forty-three percent to seventy percent of all the Internet traffic.
Millions of downloads of BitTorrent today include both official software releases and other massive files as well as illicit download of copyrighted movies and music. Though, like many other things, users have discovered ways to engage in illicit activities using BitTorrent, the protocol itself is 100% lawful.
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