Napster BitTorrent Bearshare Kazaa
Answer: Napster
As long as there have been computer networks, there have been ways for people to share files. In the early days, however, sharing files was the sole province of the computer savvy. The general public wasn’t dialing into “warez” bulletin board systems and downloading ebooks, games, and music files (in the early days, bandwidth constraints put everything but simple images, text documents, and MIDI files beyond the reach of home users).
The public awareness of the concept of file sharing and the actual use of such all changed radically in 1999 when the music sharing service Napster burst into the public sphere.
Although certainly limited by today’s standards (you could only trade music files), Napster was the public’s first taste of peer-to-peer file sharing. Unlike the more esoteric and difficult to use methods that relied on downloading and reassembling file binaries from Usenet or dialing into private servers, people could just download Napster, start searching for MP3 files, and via the Napster server system, they would be connected with someone somewhere else in the world that had the file they were looking for. Almost overnight it became trivial for the average person to swap files.
While quite popular, Napster was quickly sued out of existence thanks to its centralized server model (later returning as an identically named but different music service that wasn’t focused on illegal file sharing). It was quickly replaced by a flood of decentralized apps like Bearshare, Kazaa, and Gnutella. Eventually those apps in turn were replaced with the rise of the BitTorrent file sharing protocol, long after the file sharing genie was out of the bottle.
So you’ve built yourself a powerful gaming PC, and even gotten a case with a side panel window so you can see all your glorious work. The only problem? It looks a little…drab. Maybe the colors don’t match, maybe it’s too dark, or maybe your build is just a little messy. Here are some tips to take
Windows 10 is supposed to automatically update itself. But it might take weeks or longer for a big update like the Anniversary Update to reach your PC. Here’s why that happens–and how to skip the wait.
Fall is on its way, which can mean only one thing: football is back! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could watch whatever NFL game you want without being subject to the whims of your local cable company, though?
Pokémon, one of the most popular video game franchises of all time, has recently gotten even more popular with the release of Pokémon Go. Yet for how many people play this ubiquitous game, so many still don’t seem to know how to pronounce the name–including the CEO of the company that makes it.
If you access multiple servers throughout the work day, then being able to tell which one you are working with at a glance based on a color scheme can be very useful. Today’s SuperUser Q&A post helps a reader achieve a colorful nirvana in his work environment.
While you can easily back up your text messages to your computer so that you don’t lose them, sometimes a text message conversation is so important that you also might need a paper copy to keep in a safe place. Here’s how to print out text message conversations so that you’ll always have a physical
Think you know the answer? Click through to see if you're right!
We can’t all be blessed with 20/20 eagle-eye vision. Truth is, the font on most smartphone and computer displays is just too small. If you use Notes on macOS Sierra, you can now increase the default font size and squint less.
Annoyed that Windows 10 gives you only one setting to change the color of the taskbar, Start menu, and Action Center all at once? There’s no way to change each color individually, but we’ve got a quick Registry hack that will get you part of the way there.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is an encryption technology most commonly used by web browsers to ensure that the information transmitted between the browser and the web server is private and unaltered. Active SSL connections are most frequently indicated by a change in the host URL from