RE: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P

[Bora Akyol]

I think we need to define what P2P is before we can address this.

IMHO, P2P started with NAPSTER, yes before that there was WWW, gopher,
ftp,
files by email, bitnet, x/y/z modem, bbs  (dating myself here),
but the large scale bandwidth usage that is seen started with NAPSTER.

P2P I would define as distributed file sharing with database like search
capabilities. If you define it in this context, the bandwidth
characteristics of P2P is a lot closer (but on a higher scale) than the
bandwidth characteristics of a traditional web surfer. Hence, ADSL in
particular and asymmetric data comm in general hamper P2P.


Bora


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin J. Levy [mailto:mahtin@mahtin.com] 
> Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 4:13 PM
> To: Sean Donelan
> Cc: Bora Akyol; nanog@merit.edu
> Subject: RE: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the 
> Benefits of P2P 
> 
> 
> Sean,
> 
> >There were lots of FTP mirrors around.
> >Every Sun workstation could have a Anonymous FTP.  Of 
> course, the problem
> >was every Sun workstation could be an Anonymous FTP :-)
> 
> ... but you forgot to mention that filtering and firewalls 
> and NAT were not in common use, hence everywhere was 
> accessible from everywhere.  P2P was all there was.
> 
> Martin
>