Peer-to-peer related services

Most people feel that peer-to-peer networking is something new, but it is not. As mentioned earlier, the early Internet was a peer-to-peer network where all hosts were equals. There has also been several applications that have worked in a manner resembling todays peer-to-peer systems, although they have not been treated as such by most people.

These services are not as strictly distributed peer-to-peer systems as for example Gnutella, but instead they use a hierarchical architecture leading to better performance.