The following is the story of my involvement in Gnutella from 2000 to 2001 and also the history of how Gnutella began.

Gnutella was released around March 14, 2000 by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper the selfsame who created Winamp. I learned of Gnutella through the first Slashdot post of it. Being the first website to report of Gnutella, Slashdot touted Gnutella as the new peer-to-peer network that was going to be the next Napster. At the time Gnutella was only in beta and was never intended for the public. Unfornately the damage had already been done and once the Slashdot article had been posted AOL immediately shutdown the Nullsoft gnutella.com site. Since the download link for Gnutella was non-existant, comments by users on the Slashdot pointed out that users were gathering on Efnet in the #gnutella channnel. I was quick to join the channel and found myself among others who were already using the program. Because of the way I am and the fact that I like to try new things, I downloaded the Gnutella client and gave it a shot. Little did I know that the months in that year were going to be ones of futher devotion toward the Gnutella cause. At the time when Napster was being shutdown, Gnutella tried to beat the system by creating a network that had no hub – even though Gnutella did require an Ip address of another gnutella client to connect. What made Gnutella so popular at the time was a decentralized peer-to-peer network which anybody could share whatever they want with other and were not limited to just Mp3 files.

I continued to stay in #gnutella channel to learn about this exciting new program and to help share it with others. As more and more users started to pour in to the IRC chatroom they all continued to ask the same basic questions.. 1. Where can I download Gnutella? and 2. How do I connect to the Gnutella network with the client? So, in an effort to make it easier for people I created a quick tutorial html page and hosted it off my local machine. Users were then through the channel’s topic directed to the html page off my local machine where they could download Gnutella and learn about how to use it. Through websites such as mine and others Gnutella spread. It was not more than a few days that the webpage lasted on my local machine. My machine was beginning to develop serious performance issues due to the bandwidth and server resources that were being required to serve the information. Ian Hall-Beyer whom I meet through #gnutella came to the rescue and offered to host the site at gnutella.nerdherd.net. For a time this is where many people came to learn about Gnutella. I continued to maintain the content on the website with help and hosting support provided by Ian.

During the first few weeks of Gnutella’s initial 0.48 release other versions were released to take care of a few remaining bugs that existed in the application itself. AOL had forced Nullsoft to stop all development on Gnutella but a few updates were leaked out to secure the continued spread and vialbity of Gnutella on the Internet. The last version written by Justin Frankel was 0.56. The source code was intended to be released to the public once it reached version 1.00 but never did. These first updates were released on the nerdherd website and distributed to the public.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Gene Kan and Spencer Kimball in #gnutella. Both of whom had previous Linux programming knowledge and who both had attended UC Berkeley. I interacted with Gene on a regular basis and he eventually helped secure a more permanent home for the Gnutella website. Apparently gnutella.nerdherd.net had outgrown itself and it was time for a new hosting solution which helped Ian save much needed bandwidth. Gene cut a deal with wego.com and setup the account for the gnutella website to be hosted at gnutella.wego.com. I worked on the design of the website and organized the tutorial and information that was to be on the new site. Many of the Gnutella logos that were first used to spread Gnutella I created with Adobe Photoshop including one that Cnet used. Once the new site was finished Gene became the spokesperson for it. His email address was used as the feedback link on the site and a lot of press did use it to contact Gene about Gnutella. Through Gene’s interaction with the press he helped promote and explain Gnutella to the masses and he became the one of the leaders of the Gnutella movement.

As the builds of Gnutella stopped, the reverse-engineering of the Gnutella protocol began. It was well known that Gnutella as it was, was never going to be finished and was not a viable for average user such as Napster was. To help reverse-engineer Gnutella, the #gnutelladev channel was created and work began on other Gnutella clients. Spencer Kimball and Gene Kan worked on one of the first Gnutella clients for the Linux platform. Spencer, who had previously worked on and created the GIMP project, and Gene Kan both created the Linux Gnutella client Gnubile. In the months following other clients soon popped up including Bearshare who were locals of #gnutelladev. Limewire was also there, they even send me a Limewire T-shirt which was nice of them. The first clients created were free but many developers tried to profit off the new Gnutella peer-to-peer network. I tried myself to create a Gnutella client to see if I could do it but I did not have the level of Windows programming at the time required to do so, given I was only 16 years old. I did learn alot during that time trying to develop a client. Infact, many of the people in the #gnuelladev channel helped me and explained the Gnutella protocol to me. I used some of their code to help piece-meal mine together, but in the end nothing came of my code. The team of developers in #gnutelladev were very important to the success of the Gnutella protocol and decentralized peer-to-peer networks. They are the pioneers of Gnutella and of the peer-to-peer networks to follow afterwords.

After Gnutella I focused on my programming skills, using as the program to improve my skills on, ExtractNow. As for Ian, I don’t know what happened to him. CNet reported that Gene committed sucide and that was the first I heard of that. I was suprised by it. After working on Gnubile he created a company called InfraSearch which was invested in by Netscape and later bought by Sun Microsystems. Spencer Kimball is now working for Google. The gnutella.com website is now run by some organization I believe but I don’t really keep up with Gnutella scene anymore.

Below is a screenshot of the Gnutella.wego.com. It is similar to what it looked like when I worked on it. The logos and images and stuff I created for the website and I also put together most of the content. The page has since been translated in to Chinese for some reason and none of the links work. The actual url I found it at is located here.

Here are some Gnutella logos that I worked up at the time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 2:59 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.