Lonely genius
Boulom Cohen was born into an ordinary family on The Upper West Side of New York in 1975, a time when computer technology was booming. Like many great programmers, As a child, Blem showed talent in certain ways. At the age of 5, he began learning C on his father's new Timex Sinclair keyboard, and by the age of 16 he could already program in three languages. This man, who has shown genius in some ways, has found that there is always a gap between himself and his peers since childhood, and it is difficult to make friends with others from an early age, which makes others think that he is rebellious or lazy.
In 1993, Brahm entered New York University to specialize in computer and network technology, and has a unique insight into network sharing technology. But due to his obsession with computer technology, he almost failed his math class in his first year of college. Once, during an exam, he handed in his papers after completing the first question and refused to do the remaining 49 questions, saying that they were just simple variations of the first question.
Brahm, on the other hand, maintained a talent for programming. While still at New York University, Brahm attended a computer lecture by Bart Selman from the prestigious Bell Labs. Brahm asked Selman many questions, which impressed Selman. Selman decided: to offer the young man a summer internship and introduce him to a new algorithm in software.
His over-obsession with computer technology led to a lack of attention to other courses, which made the school extremely dissatisfied with him and the conflict between teachers and students continued. In 1994, he finally made the decision to withdraw from school. Later, he told BusinessWeek that if he had the opportunity to start over, he wouldn't even waste his high school time and should have dropped out of school to develop programs.
Down and out
After dropping out of school, Brahm began to look around for jobs. Soon after, the Internet wave appeared. After working for one Internet company after another, Boozim grew tired of this life of intense frustration. Due to personality reasons, It is difficult for Braim to stay in a company for a long time, and he is also very confused about his behavior. After reading a lot of material, he found out he had Asperger syndrome. It's a psychiatric disorder commonly known as "Little Doctor Syndrome," a condition similar to autism that gives the sick person a superhuman ability to focus on something, but at the same time makes the patient lack social skills, and they will see anyone as a stranger.
Brahm had to train himself to look into each other's eyes when talking to someone. But on the other hand, Asperger syndrome makes him very good at work, and he can force himself to think about how to solve the problem of downloading. Ever since the creation of the Internet, people have had a headache about how to cost-effectively deliver big files such as music, movies, game software, etc. On the one hand, the bandwidth problems at that time were far from what they are today, and on the other hand, under the old file sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, only a small number of people actually shared files with the world, and most users simply downloaded them.
"I'm well aware that there's actually a lot of bandwidth out there, but it's not being used properly. There are also many upload capacities that people don't use. Brahm said in a later interview. To make a different download system from Napster and Kazaa, and to mobilize all the people to participate in sharing, this was one of Bram's ideas at the time. "Although I didn't have a clear plan yet, I wasn't worried at all, partly because I thought I was doing something cool, and partly because my life was already bad at the time, so what else was I worried about?"
At that time, Bouliam, poor and destitute, had only interest in directing him to program like crazy. Initially he made a living from his savings from working in the site's boom years, and when he ran out, he lived on a credit card, and in the end, he had to use the interest-free period of one credit card to overdraft to fill the bill of another. He is doing his best to solve a problem that has been bothering him, but still to no avail.
BT is out
In 1999, Brahm joined a network company called NajoNation and began to work on the "network data distribution transmission technology" that he was best at.
A few months later, under his leadership, an app dedicated to Sharing Data for NajoNation users was born. For the first time, the program used the concept of "torrenting", using each user as a transmission center, and data uploads and downloads no longer require a specific server, and the speed is amazingly high. He approached NajoNation's boss to promote the technology, but the boss rejected him on the grounds that the fringe technology had no commercial value.
Coming home to Brem was like evaporating from the world, he sat at home all day designing what he called the "ideal tool." At lunch, the whole family watches the movie "God's Darling," which tells the story of how the great musician Mozart believed in God's instructions and ended up creating a series of classic tunes. The film "God's Darling" gave him the mental motivation to watch the film over and over again like a demon, and then said to his wife, "I know what to do, I'm going to be the next 'Mozart.'" ”
Driven by the "Mozart" belief, a beta version of BT was released in 2001. At a Linux open source software conference that same year, his BT software made its debut. When trying it out, those Liux geeks who are keen on free software were pleasantly surprised to find that when transferring large files of more than 100 megabytes, BT is thousands of times faster than ordinary ADSL, and the more people are used, the more torrents there are, and the faster the speed, so data transmission is no longer limited by bandwidth and traffic.
In 2002, at a hacking forum, he made BT famous by making it more perfect by making it more perfect in an open source way.
BT's first opportunity came in 2003, when the open source software company Red Hat? released its Red Hat Linux9 operating system. Due to the huge demand, software downloaders quickly squeezed Out Red Hat's download servers.
A guy named Foster has gotten a copy of Red Hat Linux9, and he used BT to release Red Hat Linux9 and posted a download link to the popular tech site Slashdot. In just 3 days, Red Hati enthusiasts exchanged up to 21150 GIgabytes of data, which is equivalent to the library of Congress of the Ustuan, and at its peak, about 4500 computers were exchanging file fragments at the same time, with 1.4GB of uploads and downloads per second.
Foster estimates he would spend $20,000 to $60,000 renting a network line to handle such a large amount of traffic, and now he only has to pay $99 on his daily server bill.
Since then, game makers Blizzard, SUN, and animated film giant ADV Films have all used BT to release their games, large software, and animated trailers. The VCs eventually threw $8.75 million in Bouleam, which allowed Brahm to move from Seattle back to San Francisco, as he became familiar, but he remained disheveled and wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words BioTorrent.
Loneliness remains
When the major media are making a big fuss about the "BT effect", the material is silent. His wife described: "Blem's daily life is like a glass of 'boiled water'. When he wakes up in the morning, he makes breakfast, sends the kids to school, and then goes back to his computer to see how many dollars he has deposited in his PayPal's account.
How much has the number of latest BT users increased. After lunch, he walked in the garden in front of his room, sometimes when inspiration came, he would suddenly go back to the computer and type a few lines of programs, and sometimes stay in the garden until dinner. He plays on the computer or watches TV for a while in the evening, plays with the children when he is happy, and can't say a few words a day. Indeed, in the eyes of his wife and children, he was like a fun-free stay-at-home man. He himself has revealed that he is a reclusive person, not good at dealing with outsiders, and only likes to be alone.
The success of BT has rapidly increased his popularity, and the title of "Father of BT" seems to herald a golden avenue in front of him. However, because the application of BT has accelerated the spread of piracy, he has always been able to be sued in court.
In this regard, his wife is also very helpless: "Bli mama knew from the beginning that BT would face a piracy dispute, so he may be one of the BT users who does not use BT to download any video and non-authorized software." He knew that those anti-piracy organizations were looking for an opportunity to teach him a legal lesson, and he didn't want any handle to fall into their hands. The movies he watched were all genuine DVDs bought from the store, which was simply hilarious. ”
"I never worry about the fate of BT, I just want people to use it for the right way." He said in an interview, "Just like a pre-written game program, as long as you play slowly, you won't miss a wonderful ending, even after Game Over, I still have a chance." ”