DC++ is 20 years old today

In the beginning there was NMDC, as its name says (Neo-Modus) a new way of file sharing. It was a quite good, if not revolutionary idea of its time but a bit clumsy and low-quality implementation of a business model that wanted to get revenue through displaying ads in its client software. NMDC could be used for sharing of files using a community hub capable of controlling direct file transfers between its online users and also relaying searches and instant messages. This system of direct file sharing built around online communities has quickly become a success at the end of the 90’s, despite its clumsiness and annoying limitations.

The early years

In the fall of 2001 one DC user, a secondary school teenager, thought he could easily make a much better, ad-free client for this network and that it would would be a fun project for him to improve his skills in C++ programming. So DC++, an open source replacement of the original Neo-Modus client has born, exactly 20 years ago this day. And the rest is history…

DC++ had rapidly become a success. Many users switched to it and enjoyed the new intuitive interface, the slick and fast look-and-feel, the new thoughtful functions like the ability of connecting multiple hubs in parallel. Neo-Modus had put out a new versions of its client as an answer, trying to amend the limitations of the original one but the effort was completely futile – by that time DC++ had already become the go-to client for the DC network.

As it happens with most open source development, with time, contributors appeared and helped to add their ideas and fix bugs in DC++. Many of them just came and went but some remained, giving more and more input and help for the original author to make DC++ better and better. Somehow, the changelog of DC++ preserved some of what that early development was like, it is a fun to read from the distance of so many years, especially for those who hadn’t been around DC that time.

But not all of those outside ideas and directions were accepted to DC++. Many people wanted to go to different ways and this can be easily done in open source; soon, there was no shortage of various forks of DC++, some existing just for the sake of a few additional functions while others went much further, to different directions adding complete set of new features and optimizations. But, with the exception of the few examples, most of them were still built around the code provided in DC++ as a base. Many forks were short-lived, having been abandoned within months or years but a few ones are still remained being developed or at least maintained these days.

These were the years when DC as a file sharing network flourished; public hubs with overall usercount in the hundred thousand magnitude and also a lot of smaller private communities.

On the pinnacle of file sharing

Once DC++ achieved the initial target of being a fast, full-featured, easy-to-use NMDC replacement, it was time to improve the initial system created by Neo-Modus. The protocol (1), (2), connections, file transfers were insecure, especially the latter; file identification and corruption problems were an everyday thing in DC. For example, files were identified by their names and sizes only so searches for other sources for the same file many times came up with another file of the same size, resulting a corrupted download.

This needed to be fixed and the fix came in the form of Tiger Tree Hashes that allowed the files to be properly identified, searched and verified after download so no corrupted or arbitrary content would arrive anymore to your computer. It’s still the same today; it comes with the need of hashing files before sharing, but it provides the ultimate safety and integrity. Some users and forks hated hashing and stayed behind – eventually, DC++ has become incompatible with these old clients and their stubborn users.

Interesting part of the story is that before the old ways of transfers without hash check is finally removed in 2006, the team has released DC++ v0.674, a version that’s become quite popular among large group of DC users – so much that even today it is still the most widely used old version of DC++ among those stubborn people mentioned above. Yes, this version was moderately stable at the time, an end result of an era in the development of DC++, still compatible with the old hashless ways. And since big changes were coming in the forthcoming releases, this one remained known as “the best” and “working” DC client for many. Nevertheless, DC++ 0.674 has soon become less and less secure and by today plenthora of vulnerabilities has been discovered in it. Also, being developed on a different era with the tools of the time, it isn’t that stable running on modern Windows versions, either. Our favorite support requests are when people demand to fix these instability issues on a 10+ year old version of the program when even most of the tools that used to build DC++ back then aren’t working anymore on operating systems of today. Of course the fix is available long time ago, only a version upgrade away.

Still leading the way to be secure

In the meantime, DC’s decline started to happen as in the middle of the 2000’s torrents became popular. The development of the Internet as a whole and the way torrents work fitted better for many file sharing users. In torrents, related group of files were bundled and client software were easier to set up and use, community members not needed to be online with a client software anymore to communicate with each other as messages were persistent on the web. IRC could be set up and used for those who missed instant messaging so this was a suitable replacement of earlier file sharing methods for many.

Yet the author of DC++ had his next big thing to realize. A complete change of the old commmunication protocol of DC, inherited from Neo-Modus, to a brand new one that is professionally designed, defined and documented; a standard protocol that is secure, aims to fix the design issues of the old one and is extensible with features, most notably with support of secure encrypted connections. The new protocol was named Advanced Direct Connect (ADC) and the first draft has been released in 2006. In parallel, with the help of many contributors, elements of the new protocol had been started to built into DC++ and also into its forks.

Thanks to ADC, by the end of the first decade of the new millenium Direct Connect was ready for the change to become a fully standardized file sharing system with safe and secure encrypted communications. Yet ADC has never taken off, really. Partly because it has came too late and the focus of file sharing has already moved elsewhere, partly because the reluctance of members of the DC network: key hub software developers, hub owners and hub list server maintainers. Many new ADC hubsoftware started to appear, written from scratch, some were just hobby projects while others showed promise and were high quality software. Since the DC network was reluctant to adapt to ADC, most of the new hub software were abandoned soon, and by now only a few that are still maintained. ADC has become popular only within small private DC communities due to its security and advanced integrity.

From development to maintenance

By 2008, DC++ had completely switched to free, open source build tools and libraries, not to rely on closed products of big tech companies. Meanwhile, inputs from the original author of DC++ started to phase out and eventually completely stopped. Under the control of a new leading developer DC++ had started to catch up with other DC clients in user-friendliness: new graphical UI elements, modern look-and-feel, easier setup and complete documentation of UI elements and functions, plenty of new functions like automated connectivity setup, secure encrypted private messages between users and so on.

And then, after a few years, the constant development that had characterized DC++ in its first 12 years of existence, just ended abruptly. In the following years DC++ had been slowly switched into maintenance mode, with mostly essential security and small bug fixes added to each release. Some other DC clients are still improving – changing and adding features to DC in their own ways but, at least to this point, remaining mostly compatible with DC++.

And this is where we are at today, 20 years after the start.

These above just semi-randomly picked important parts of the whole story. There were ups and downs, problems and solutions, you can find many more piece of the puzzle (mostly the technical aspects) throughout this blog. But the things mentioned here today are enough to show that key people created and worked on DC++ had been the most influential ones on the development of the DC network, at least in the best part of the last two decades. And while by now others shaping DC, almost everything is still based on the work of the people who have been in and around DC++ in these years.

And all the contributors to DC++, both ones who realized plenty of big ideas and ones with just small additions, they’ve done it mostly for having fun and to learn new things, improve themselves. They were many – you can find all the names preserved in the About box of DC++.

DC++ is still somewhat popular these days, around 10k people still interested on it in a course of a month. The program is still maintained, albeit in a slower speed and no ambitious feature updates in the plans. People remained with the project want to provide the safety, stability and compatibility and want to make sure that DC++ at least remains viable for some use cases. Hopefully, this will help users to keep having fun using DC++ for many more years.

Happy birthday DC++ and keep on sharing!