BitTorrent started out in 2001 as snazzy software for vastly faster downloads, designed by Bram Cohen, a freelance programmer in Berkeley, Calif.

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When Bram Cohen first authored the BitTorrent spec in 2001, the intent was to improve file-sharing performance of existing single-source arenas -- Napster, KaZaA and their ilk.

ENGADGET: Editorial: Legal torrent sites are innovators of media consumption

Bittorrent -- Bram Cohen debuted Bittorrent, a method of downloading files that pieced them together from many users' computers instead of pulling them from a single source, in 2002.

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