The old days
Bittorent is nearly 3 years old and still getting more popular evey day. Let’s take a look at the “old” days. In the first half of 2003 BitTorrent had his big break. It started with porn, because Bram Cohen needed a lot of peers to test the protocol, and it seemed that giving away free porn was the best way to do this.
Next the anime scene discovered BitTorrent and soon after that torrent sites were filled with movies and tv-shows.
Some big sites back in those days were:
http://www.bytemonsoon.com/
http://www.torrentse.cx/
http://www.suprnova.org/
However, those sites went down every now and then (uptime around 20%) because their servers couldn’t handle the growing popularity.
July 2003 torrentse.cx was forced to shut down their site because of a “cease and desist” letter, they stated:
The site torrentse.cx recieved a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.
Bytemonsoon died around the same time stating:
Due to excessive bw usage, lack of a stable host, also constant dos attacks and lack of other options as i’m leaving in 5 hours and havent slept yet, I have no other choice but to shut the site down. If anyone is willing to take the job of administering the site, including providing host and bw, plus defending against dos attacks, the code and database is up for grabs. I would even continue to do the coding. Sorry to everyone for this, but i have no other choice. I wish i could keep it up; it’s been really great, even though it’s been a constant struggle. I’m pretty worn out right now so I dunno what else to say. Sorry again.”
The admin of Bytemonsoon then took a vacation, and the website never returned.
So that left us with suprnova. Everybody probably knows that story. Allthough Sloncek, the guy behind suprnova still experienced some problems every now and then, the site remained in the air till the end of 2004.
