The process is reversed to allow anyone to become the client or the node, in other words the sever. While Napster popularized P2P, it actually is not a pure P2P model, with it actually being a P2P hybrid, which we will get to later. .
Where did peer-to-peer come from? .
P2P surprisngly has been around since the birth of the internet. Actually they were twins, with each being developed and born injunction with each other. The P2P protocal was developed jointly in the 1960's by UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah (P2P history, p1). They develped the very first instance of the interent, called ARPANET. Instead of ARPANET being in the tradtional client/server setup, it was connected rather in the Peer-to-Peer arangement, with each university being connected to the other university directly, without the need for a central server. P2P was not popularized until a college freshman deciced he needed a better way to download music through the internet. Napster was born in 1999 when it was developed by then eightteen year old college student Shawn Fanning. He was frustrated with knowing how many audio files,( mp3s) were laying around, hiding on the interent. Without an efficent protocal of transportation, he rarely got a mp3 onto his desktop. Being the programer he was, he incorporated the ease of a windows based program, the reliability of unix, the instant messeging of IRC (interent relay chat), and the power of internet search engines to create "Napster." Napster was the filesharing peer-to-peer rookie on the block, starting it all and keeping the technology alive, even when it recieved death from the entertainment industry on February 12, 2001.(P2P History, p.1) In between, the free Napster peaked with a user base of thirteen million users, which out peaked AOL and saw a record 2.7 billion music downloads. It became the fastest growing piece of software ever in the history of computing.
