Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Beyond E-Mail

E-mail was inherently peer to peer in its original implementation—a message from a user at a terminal on one machine to a user on another, something that underlies the basic syntax of the “user@machine” address invented thirty years ago by Ray Tomlinson to streamline a feature that was already then some six years old.

Over time, however, this direct user-to-user communication became more indirect. The user model of terminals directly connected to respective mainframe computers evolved into a situation where most had individual transient connections from local PCs to the network and could not support the protocol requirements.

E-mail transport presupposes a constant connectivity on the part of the recipient service, so it’s not ...