Gnutella In 1997, a small division of America Online decided to create a unique file sharing program intended to allow AOL users to share files with each other. But after realizing the potential for piracy within the program, AOL quickly abandoned the project, named Gnutella (pronounced nu-tel-la). But seeing the program's potential, the group of developers who had previously been developing Gnutella left AOL and continued work on Gnutella. Their work resulted in a file sharing system that works like this:

User A sends a request for a file name to the server. That server sends the request to eight other users. If one of their files meets the request criteria, the file name is sent back to user A. Each of these users sends the request to eight other users and so forth. Currently, many developers along with a few companies are developing Gnutella clients for many platforms. These clients can access hundreds of Gnutella servers, and also share files from a hard disk. Gnutella clients are availible for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, and Macintosh OS X.

For more information about Gnutella clients, see the reviews page.

To download a Gnutella client, go to the downloads folder on the CD.

To find out more about Gnutella, go to the links page.