Happy Birthday Gnutella!

OK, I’ve been severely neglecting the ol’ blog, I know. I’m breaking the silence to join Janko Roettgers and NewTeeVee in wishing Gnutella a Happy Birthday on the week of its 10 year anniversary. We had some great times at LimeWire and battling it out on the Gnutella Developer’s Forum back in the day.

One of my favorite moments had to be in the summer of 2000 when Vinnie Falco, creator of BearShare, and my fellow LimeWire developer and partner in crime in the old days, Chris Rohrs, would talk about Gnutella architecture decisions. Vinnie’s an Italian American who was living in Miami Beach at the time. Chris is an MIT grad who grew up one town away from me in Deerfield, MA, one of the oldest towns in the country (close to my beloved Greenfield), and about as culturally far away from Miami Beach as one can get in the US. Chris would give Vinnie some piece of advice about this or that, and Vinnie would respond with the perfect Miami Beach Italian American accent, “Hey, you’re talking to the Vin.” And that’s how the Gnutella network was built.

Chris has been tearing it up at Google for years now, and Vinnie probably owns some tiny island in the South Pacific where he buried a chest full of BearShare gold back in 2002.

Check out Janko’s more thorough article, the best and one of the few histories of Gnutella I’ve seen written down.

I’ll be writing more here soon — been hammering out so much code for so many different things (all feeding back in to LittleShoot), it’s been a struggle to find time to blog about them. Technology’s progressing so rapidly on so many fronts, it’s more fun to keep coding! Stay tuned for news about LittleProxy, a sweet little HTPP proxy I’ve been working on using Netty. LittleProxy will be a core component of a new system for circumventing censors around the world. Oh yeah, and lots of other stuff too.