Anyone else remember music sharing circa 1998? I certainly do.
Right before Napster came out there was Scour Media Agent – It looked a bit like this:
It worked on Windows SMB because back then “Firewalls” were something only big businesses had and times were simple. Our office at the time had direct internet connections so every device had a directly addressable internet IP. Even NAT at the time was not fully baked.
Side note: Scour used to provide the IP of the machines you were downloading from so at least 50% of the time you could find an IP/dns in Scour, do a \\joesmoe.cam.ma.cox.net\c$ and see and usually edit the entire contents of some strangers PC. Boggles the mind in retrospect.
So who created Scour? Well, as part of a student team at UCLA the answer is Travis Kalanick aka Mr. Uber!