BitTorrent: Revolution in the Network

Abstract

It was April 2001 and Bram Cohen had quit his job. Sitting at his dining-room table, laptop to hand, he was working on a personal project. Tapping away at the keyboard he reeled out lines of code onto the screen, stopping every now and again to pace the house before returning to his seat to tap some more. When Cohen had had a job it was with a dot.com start-up called MojoNation. MojoNation was looking to create a P2P network that could store encrypted chunks of files across multiple computers. The idea was interesting but the implementation was still clunky and complicated. It was far from suitable for public use and money was running out. This scenario was not unusual for Cohen. During the 1990s he had worked as a programmer for a variety of dot.com start-ups that had gone bust. Every time he saw his project never reach its audience, and it was becoming apparent that MojoNation would be no exception. Tired of never seeing anything through to completion, Cohen quit. He didn’t have an income to speak of; instead, he was subsisting off of his savings and a well-executed regime of transferring debt across 0% introductoryrate credit cards. Being a man without an income it might be assumed that his personal project was seeking to remedy that — some potential dot.com hit that would make Cohen rich.