Articles

FidoNet and Peer to Peer
(P2P) - State-of-the-art
by Anton "Tony" Koker, Jr. (TonyKoker@bigfoot.com)

In my meanderings through the information technology landscape, trying to keep abreast of information pertinent to the honing of my skills and art, I found an article which relates directly to FidoNet. Expecially so since FidoNet is cited as a fine example of technology that has withstood and continues to withstand the test of time. The following is an excerpt from that article (used with permission from the author):

"Early attempts

P2P computing isn't all that new. The term P2P is, of course, a new invention, but basic P2P technology has been around at least as long as USENET and FidoNet -- two very successful, completely decentralized networks of peers. P2P computing may be even older (I hereby issue a challenge to my readers to find the earliest P2P application -- extra points will be awarded if it's still in use), but these two examples suffice to demonstrate its age. The bottom line is that many of the people using P2P applications today weren't even using computers when the first P2P applications appeared.

USENET, born back in 1979, is the distributed application that provides most of the world with its newsgroups (my favorites are rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction). Its earliest incarnation was the work of two graduate students named Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. At the time, nothing like the "on-demand" Internet we know today existed. Files were exchanged in batch over phone lines, often at night when long distance rates were lowest. Consequently, there was no effective way to centralize the function of the USENET. The natural result was an extremely decentralized, distributed application -- a structure it retains to this day.

The other outstanding early P2P success is FidoNet. FidoNet, like USENET, is a decentralized, distributed application for exchanging messages. FidoNet was created in 1984 by Tom Jennings as a way to exchange messages between users of different BBS systems. Because it filled a need, it quickly grew and, like USENET, it remains in use today.

Both USENET and FidoNet are interesting because both of them, years ago, ran into and overcame many of the problems that modern P2P applications are running into today, with scalability being the most obvious, but security and a host of other problems being addressed as well. For P2P computing to succeed, its proponents must be willing to learn from history."

from http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-p2p/:

The practice of peer-to-peer computing: Introduction and history

A new-fangled name, but an old and useful approach to computing

Todd Sundsted (todd-p2p@etcee.com)
Chief Architect, PointFire, Inc.
March 2001