I have been using GetRight for a
long time. It is still, IMHO, one of the most amazing download
managers that has been written. It is to downloading, what ICQ is
to IM … the ultimate download manager with options and features
beyond what the average person could ever use.

Tonight, I was using it’s “mirrors” capabilites, and realized that it provided a “torrent”-like capability long before BitTorrent
was around. GetRight allows me to click a link in my browser, and
select for GetRight to handle the downloading. As the download
starts, I can then go and visit other mirror sites for the same file,
and click those links also. GetRight will automatically notice
that it is already downloading that file, and start a new connection to
the new source server … and split the download into “segments”.
In this example I am downloading four segments of the Fedora Core 3 CD
#4. I simply went to four different mirror servers and clicked
the link to download the same file from each one. GetRight
handled everything else!

It is intelligent software like this, that probably contributed to
ideas like BitTorrent. In this case, I am able to leverage the
various mirrors that exist to increase me download bandwidth …
without requiring things to be in a BitTorrent format. It’s funny
that I have been doing this for quite a while, but failed to think
about the similarity to BitTorrent.