The innovation of Napster was in the file-sharing method applied by Fanning, who put into place a variety of what is known in the computer industry as peer-to-peer networking.
Up until the mid-1990s, most home computers or PCs in America existed on their own, as little islands on which information could be stored and retrieved. However, thanks to the spread of the Internet and the linkage of computers to the Net through Internet service providers, most PCs (not to mention larger computers used by business) soon were linked to networks, or systems of computers connected by communication lines. A network typically depends on a server, an extremely powerful computer that acts as a central governing mechanism, routing information and directing communication traffic. In a peer-to-peer network, however, there is no dedicated or full-time server; instead, each computer is at once independent and linked with the others in a non-hierarchical arrangement.
The particular genius of Fanning's system is in its file-storage mechanism. While Napster required a server to perform basic functions, the server did not have to function as a memory bank for its users' thousands upon thousands of mp3 files—which, though they are compressed, still take up far more disk space than most user files such as word-processing documents.
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