File sharing timeline

This article presents a timeline of events in the history of file sharing.

=1970s=

1978

February, the first BBS (CBBS) is born.

=1980s=

1985

October, FTP protocol specifications are published as an RFC.

=1990s=

1990

November, Tim Berners-Lee publishes a proposal for the World Wide Web and writes the first Web page.

1999

Napster is released. (Birth of peer-to-peer file sharing systems)

December, lawsuit are filed against Napster by several major recording companies

=2000s=

2000

**March, First Gnutella client is published. Gnutella-network, being the first decentralised file sharing system, is born. ( Note that it is decentralized only after initialization. ) **September, PornDigger! beta 1.0 is published to registered beta testers, introducing use of thumbnails in p2p filesharing.

2001

**March, FastTrack protocol and Kazaa are introduced **July, Napster shut down its entire network **October, First public version of Mutella Gnutella client is published **November, GNUnet is first publicly announced *2002 **February, BitTorrent debuts at CodeCon **November, Gnutella2 protocol is announced *2003 **november, The source code of Winny is confiscated by the Kyoto Police in the late november or soon after *2004 **May, Winny developer Isamu Kaneko is arrested for suspected conspiracy to commit copyright violation

2005

**June, United States Supreme court judges Grokster developers being guilty of encouraging their users to copyright infringements