From the Editors: Peer-to-Peer Community--Looking beyond the Legacy of Napster and Gnutella

Trace back to 1999: that was the year Napster took the music world by storm. The application brought together millions of music enthusiasts eager to share and download each other's song collections. The ease with which two "peers" could share a file was refreshing. At its peak in early 2000, this rage had resulted in a network of about 60 million Napster users. It was also around this time that the phrase peer to peer (P2P) came to be associated with systems such as Napster. The phenomenon not only stirred the social sphere but also created a buzz in the academic and industrial worlds. Anyone who knew anything about distributed systems was asking, is P2P computing really a new paradigm?