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After a year or so of attempting to describe the revolution in file sharing and related technologies, we have finally settled on a label for what's happening: peer-to-peer.
Somehow, though, this label hasn't clarified things. Taken literally, servers talking to one another are peer-to-peer. The game Doom is peer-to-peer. There are even people applying the label to e-mail and telephones. Meanwhile, Napster, which jump-started the conversation, is not peer-to-peer in the strictest sense, because it uses a centralized server to store pointers and resolve addresses.
If we treat peer-to-peer as a literal definition for what's happening, then we have a phrase that describes Doom but not Napster, and suggests that Alexander Graham Bell was a peer-to-peer engineer but Shawn Fanning is not...
Information obtained from openp2p.com
Article by Clay Shirky, 11-24-2000
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