Swarmcast
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Swarmcast, invented by Justin Chapweske, who later sold it to Opencola, was the first peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery system and the originator of the term "Swarming Downloads".
It works by breaking a file into lots of little packets, distributing those packets around to computers that have downloaded the file, and randomly requesting those packets from whoever has them. The result is a mesh of packets, which, with a large number of users, can be downloaded in parallel for faster downloads.
The technique of downloading a single file in pieces from multiple sources was also used in later peer-to-peer systems, including BitTorrent and derivatives of Gnutella such as BearShare.