The way we presently perceive the internet and our attitudes relating to it owe much to a particular day in history: September the 18th, 2005 – that was the day when a little client application called uTorrent was first released. Although disregarded in the beginning, it later proved to be a turning point in the internet software development industry, since that was the first time a freeware program with such a small memory footprint managed to combine power, stability and low resource usage capacities. Today this downloader is one of the most popular clients in the world (except China, where the local market is heavily promoting Chinese client programs), which is no surprise, given the proven capacities and the fact that it comes in 54 languages.
The Beginnings
The creator of the program confessed that the idea for the revolutionary application came from his dissatisfaction with the degree in which software developers were including more and more unnecessary features into their programs, and with the way these features were using significant amounts of system resources (a process called bloatware or software bloat). After working for a month on conceptualizing the plan for the development of the program, he stopped coding uTorrent for a whole year, resuming his work in September 2005. Just three days later, the world could have the first glimpse of what he had created: a small and efficient torrent client that offered support for older hardware and operating system versions as well.
Public Reception
Since its first release, it has been continuously praised for its small size, excellent downloading speeds and for keeping computer resource consumption to the minimum. These are the key aspects that helped set this program apart from other clients and have made it a favorite tool with so many users. Along the seven years of existence and the sixteen releases until today, many reputed websites have underlined the importance it had and still has in shaping the download industry. uTorrent is listed among today’s fundamental internet tools, but the most important appreciation comes from the millions of users worldwide who benefit of all the amazing features it can offer.
