P2P in 2001

nihilist_1137 writes: "Zdnet is reporting that P2P is becoming more used in business. "It's now over two years since a few underground song-swapping services put peer-to-peer technology firmly at the forefront of the IT agenda... A look back at some of the more significant P2P stories of 2001 shows that -- although not a new concept -- P2P is starting to assume a very important role in the corporate space, as tech giants scramble to succeed in this new market."" Hard to believe that the Napster battles have been going on for two years now.

Comments

How come old technology keeps making headlines?

[pointym5]

So now distributed computing has this neat new "p2p" hax0r acronym, and the fact that you can write distributed applications if you've got networked computers is news. That Ray Ozzie is planning on writing a distributed application is news. That the army wants to hook GIs together in a wireless network is news.

Sorry, but does anybody remember CORBA? DCOM? Or any of the zillion other frameworks for writing distributed applications that've been around for over a decade? A whole freaking lot of corporate applications ALREADY DEPLOYED are distributed applications that, in some way or another, are "p2p" applications. The one I'm personally most familiar with is Tivoli, which was a distributed app with installed clients interoperating via a distributed framework as far back as 1992. Does that make us Tivoli people futuristic super-geniuses? No, it doesn't -- because distributed apps have been on people's minds since networking was born. I mean, duhh. But hack together something that lets people swap ripped songs, and *poof* it's a "new wave".

And does anybody else feel like we've been hearing about soldiers wired together for years and years (and years)?