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In the late 90s- early 2000s it was a hard time for internet in Russia. Internet finally became acessable to larger public but it was slow, expensive, unstable and trough 56k modem from a telepone line it was a pain to download anything.

(just a funny background thing, internet was sold on small internet cards- different card for each provider with an acess code and each card had a time limit for how much you paid, so people bought internet in minutes like 200 minutes, 1000 minutes. The high price and bad quality of the internet started a funny joke comparing the idea of getting internet withcards with getting food rations for food cards like it was during WW2. so i thought that comparison was kinda funny)

Anyway, the late 80s geek generation saw this as a problem. Everyone wanted information but file sharing was nearly impossible.

So was born a thing called Project Freeway (Проект Магистраль

It was a closed forum which only members could view. The forum was split by cities and regions of russia. On the forums people listed the content (music movies, pc games programs etc) they owned as well as content which they wanted to get. They gave their adresses so sometimes people sent dvds with content by mail, but that wanst the most secure way.

The most interesting thing about this is how info was exchaged via travellers. So each city had a file sharing exchane point- a person who all the content went to that people wanted to share and exchange.

so a traveler who is a fellow member of project freeway would stop by this person when he is in his city, and let him copy all the content on your DVD that people from his city want to his drive. Then,if he had any wanted content from your list, he would add it to your dvd. Then these people would share the content with the content with friends from their own area.
And so a single dvd would sometimes travel all over the country collecting content,getting filled up a bit more every stop (of course the travellers would always carry a few blank dvds with them). And yes blank CDs DVDs were expensive (they still kinda are, $6.00 per single blank DVD). so people tried using every mb of free space they could.

Then by mid 2000s when internet became faster and more developed project freeway died.

my frend was a member, he helped develop it and did travel a lot collecting content on DVDs he told me about this.

So thats how one of the earliest file sharing networks functioned.
I started to wonder, was there anything like this in other countries when internet was crappy?

Wow. didn't know that existed, internet has been around most of my life so i grew up with that cursed dialup, we just got off of it in 09, that's cool though, a unique way to transfer data, like a redneck network

A very interesting post. Thanks for sharing. It's interesting what communities can do when faced with problems. Maybe carrier pigeon would've been better though!

Wow, this is pretty sweet. I've always had broadband internet since I started bothering with the internet.

Roll on fibre optic! Communication at the speed of light! Until it reaches a server then gets translated back into that sooo slow electricity junk.

haha

I first connection to the internet was a 28.8 modem. I remember buying my first US Robotics 56k, though technically most phone lines were limited to 53k unless you had newer upgraded lines. I remember taking several hours to download a 7mb file. And nothing sucked more than hitting 90% of a download after 3 hours then getting disconnected! Eventually, download managers became very popular. As for dial-up service, I never paid for it as there was always a free service somewhere out there if you knew where to look. And yes, I mean legitimately free.

thats exactly why project freeway was created. And in those days, internet cost money per minute or per megabyte. So if you start downloading a 7mb file for several hours, you are already spending internet money. and then if it disconnects at 98% , you will have to start all over again, and spend even more minutes and megabytes.