

Happy Birthday, Gnutella: Pioneering P2P Protocol Turns Ten - adamfisk
http://newteevee.com/2010/03/20/happy-birthday-gnutella-pioneering-p2p-protocol-turns-ten

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xal
Justin Frankel is my hero. I learned so much programming from his releases. I
remember having a fully printed and annotated copy of the Waste source code.

He is one of those extremely rare programmers of the "too smart to need unit
tests" type and he can come up with paradigm shifting code by hacking on
something in a weekend.

All his utilities were fully dependency free, straight up C code that compiled
something epic into a 50kb executable. Back in the day I had a job which paid
a substantial bonus for every kilobyte that I managed to shave off the
executable binary size ( 14.4 baud modem days ) and his code as well as all
the code from the 4k and 64k demo scene that was available was my only
reference material.

I lost track of what he is up to these days, but I hope he found much
happiness after the apparently tough AOL time.

~~~
mark_h
Reminds me of this comment too: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012496>

_I thought I was pretty good until I worked with the guy who made Winamp. It
took me a couple weeks to make some enhancements to their add-ons site. It
took him a couple weeks to write his own version of Pro Tools._

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maxklein
Those were the days. I remember how there used to be so many arguments and
petty battles about which protocol or extension to use, and all the
incompatible clients and how one client maker would add an extension that
would break other clients. There were so many vested interests, including the
music industry giants who also had their internal clients being developed.

And the bittorrent came and overtook all of them pretty quickly.

The file-sharing scene looked calm from the outside, but on the inside the
wars and the intrigues were vicious.

