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had gained them. Some experts even believed for a time that peer-to-peer technologies would be the savior of Net companies and their investors. That proved overly optimistic. But the Valley did invest in more than one hundred peer-to-peer start-ups, and such companies as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Intel began researching and funding new efforts. The increased public awareness of the technology also helped bring attention to preexisting systems that basked in Napster's aura. The beneficiaries included attempts at what technologists called “distributed computing,” the use of many small, individual processors to accomplish collectively what even supercomputers can't. Though the process was not necessarily peer-to-peer as most defined that term, the distributed-computing campaign gained momentum from the Napster phenomenon.

Perhaps the best-known instance of a wide public contribution to distributed computing was SETI@home, an offshoot of the long-running SETI project, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The project analyzes incoming signals from space, looking for patterns that might indicate other life. By early 2000, more than 1.6 million people in 224 countries had downloaded the program to crunch signal data on their PCs when their computers weren’t otherwise in use. Other distributed-computing efforts allowed average computer users to volunteer their machines to help in cancer research and for a range of other charitable tasks.

Another recipient of Napster-fueled attention was FreeNet, a decentralized information-sharing system first described by Irishman Ian Clarke in a thesis completed in June 1999, when fewer than a thousand people knew about Napster. Clarke's goal was to defeat censorship by protecting anonymity. Some people used FreeNet for music, but it was optimized for text. Like Gnutella, FreeNet had no central index or control: Clarke said that even if someone held a gun to his head, there was no way he could disable the system. And Clarke’s system avoided Gnutella's early problem with scaling to a massive size. While Gnutella forwarded requests for data to servers at random, which then forwarded those requests until traffic snarled, FreeNet's machines made educated guesses about which computers would be most responsive. Everyone who participated in the system was guaranteed anonymity in exchange for agreeing to store on his or her own computer whatever the system put there. By

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