In an era when bandwidth was measured in KB, “downloading” was a craft. Faced with 56K modems and 512K trickles, the browser’s built-in download box was frail: it did not support resume after interruption, and if the connection dropped at 99%, a whole night’s wait was wasted. So every PC installation checklist always had a dedicated slot for download tools, and one of the fiercest software wars in the Chinese internet was born. In the old catalog pages restored by the Winzheng Software History Archive, the version numbers, editor star ratings, and user complaints from that time are still there—the archive itself tells the story of how this war was won and lost.
Multi-Threading Enlightenment: Splitting One Pipe into Ten
The enlightenment came from the simple magic of “multi-threaded downloading”: split a file into several segments, download them at the same time, and then stitch them back together, making the speed visibly multiply. Earlier tools such as NetAnts completed the market education, but the throne belonged to FlashGet. In the archive, this v3.0 beta1 listing carries a five-star editor rating. At its peak, it was almost a must-have for every PC installation, and “creating categorized folders before downloading” became a ritual for a generation. Back then, FlashGet did only one thing: squeeze every last drop out of your tiny pipe.
The BT Revolution: The More People Downloaded, the Faster It Got
Then BT arrived, bringing a rule that overturned common sense: the more people downloaded, the faster the speed became. Servers were no longer the bottleneck; every downloader was also an uploader. In the archive sits the official client of the protocol itself, BitTorrent, with a five-star editor rating. But in the Chinese-speaking world, the public face was BitComet—also five stars. Its introduction page at the time still emphasized “disk cache technology, effectively reducing damage to hard drives caused by high-speed random read and write operations”: leaving a computer on all night to seed made hard drives as precious as share ratios. Minimalists revered uTorrent, whose entire installer was only 262KB, so small it felt like a joke. Torrents, seeding, share ratios, “please re-upload”—BT left the Chinese internet with an entire vocabulary, as well as the saddest term of all: “dead torrent.”
Donkey or Mule: A Textual Battle Sparked by a Name
Standing alongside BT was another underground world: the eDonkey family. Here lay one of the classic muddles of the Chinese internet. The protocol’s origin, eDonkey, was literally translated as “electric donkey,” while the open-source client eMule should have been called “electric mule.” Yet VeryCD also called its own modified easyMule client “eDonkey”, and textual purists argued for a decade over the “donkey-versus-mule” distinction. Arguments aside, Mod culture flourished here. The introduction page for eMule MorphXT—rated five stars by editors—said it was “known for stable and efficient upload performance, making it very suitable for publishers.” Note: upload performance. “All for one, and one for all” was not just a slogan. For the first time, a generation understood at the technical level that uploading was also a virtue.
Thunder’s Asymmetric Assault: P2SP and High-Speed Channels
The tool that ended the fragmentation was Thunder. Its P2SP technology mixed HTTP, FTP, and P2P resources into the same download task—the fragments of the file you were downloading might come from a server, or from millions of computers with Thunder installed. Its speed advantage was immediately obvious, and the lightweight Mini Thunder also removed the last barrier created by the idea that “download tools are complicated.” The old king’s grave was on the neighboring shelf: the editor rating for FlashGet V3.4 had fallen from five stars to three, while the introduction page for another community-made ad-free version opened with a pointed question: “Why does FlashGet still have to add so many ads now?” Rumor had it that the founder had lost interest in the fight, but the archive records a simpler fact: the product had been neglected, ads were everywhere, and users had no choice but to make clean versions themselves. Dynasties changed; the star ratings bear witness.
The Battle of Dedicated Links: The Encrypted Barrier of thunder://
In the later stages of the war, the weapons grew uglier. Encrypted “dedicated links” such as thunder://, flashget://, and qqdl:// wrapped real download addresses inside each company’s private format. Resource sites were forced to pick sides, and ordinary links became increasingly rare. This Thunder/FlashGet/Xuanfeng dedicated-link parsing plugin in the archive is evidence of that era: users had to install a Chrome plugin to restore dedicated links into real addresses before they could reclaim the right to choose “which tool to use for downloading.” First, walls were built against one another; then someone came along to tear them down. The same script would later be replayed almost unchanged in the mobile internet’s blocking of external links.
Tencent Enters, as Usual
By the fifth article in this series, readers should already be familiar with this segment: Tencent entered, as usual. Super Xuanfeng arrived with a four-star rating and was later renamed QQ Xuanfeng, becoming a standard part of the bundled Tencent suite. But download-tool victories were not decided by social connections; they were decided by resource coverage and speed. The QQ social graph, so invincible at the card-and-board-game table, failed this time to replicate the script of the Lianzhong battle. QQ Xuanfeng ran alongside the leaders for years before quietly shutting down, becoming one of the few battlefields Tencent did not win.
The Endgame: The Copyright Era and the Cloud-Drive Cycle
What truly ended this war was not any single rival. At the end of 2009, resource sites such as BTChina were shut down amid copyright enforcement, and VeryCD’s resource section later saw large-scale removals. The underground world lost its ammunition. Meanwhile, home broadband raced toward 100 Mbps, and the multi-threading magic of “squeezing tiny pipes dry” lost its reason to exist. The cloud drives that took over played the script in reverse: back then, multi-threading existed to maximize bandwidth; today, speed limits exist to sell memberships. Bandwidth is no longer the bottleneck—the business model is. The overnight wait has become the final second of hesitation before paying for a membership.
Epilogue: What Share Ratios Taught Us
Looking back, the download-tool wars left a generation with more than just a few software names. BT’s share ratios and eMule’s upload credits were the first time many people understood the word “community” at a technical level. FlashGet’s fall from five stars to three proved that a simple public evaluation such as an editor rating was enough to leave hard evidence of a product’s decline. Back then, netizens chose download tools by looking at star ratings; today, developers choose large models by looking at independent evaluation data. The logic has never changed: when public resources are involved, reputation cannot be faked.
The original listing pages for these download tools—including version numbers, file sizes, editor star ratings from the time, and introductions—have all been restored and published in the Software History Archive. The archive is only for historical preservation and research, and does not provide any downloads. The first four articles in the series are: “The 2008 PC Installation Checklist,” “The Free Revolution in Antivirus Software,” “The Input Method Wars,” and “The Internet Café Era.” What was the first large file you left your computer on overnight to finish downloading? Drop the secret code in the comments.
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