Bram Cohen
| Bram Cohen | |
|---|---|
Bram Cohen, 2015
|
|
| Born |
October 12, 1975 New York City, NY, U.S. |
| Residence | San Francisco Bay Area |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Stuyvesant High School |
| Alma mater | University at Buffalo |
| Occupation | Chief Scientist, BitTorrent, Inc. |
| Known for | |
| Spouse(s) | Jenna Cohen |
| Children | 3 |
| Relatives | Ross Cohen (brother) |
| Awards |
USENIX STUG Award Time 100 MIT TR35 |
| Website | bramcohen |
Bram Cohen (born October 12, 1975) is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) , as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of CodeCon and organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area P2P-hackers meeting, and was the co-author of Codeville.
Cohen grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City as the son of a teacher and computer scientist. He claims he learned the BASIC programming language at the age of 5 on his family's Timex Sinclair computer. Cohen passed the American Invitational Mathematics Examination to qualify for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) while he attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He graduated from Stuyvesant in 1993 and attended SUNY Buffalo. He later dropped out of college to work for several dot com companies throughout the mid to late 1990s, the last being MojoNation, an ambitious but ill-fated project he worked on with Jim McCoy.
MojoNation allowed people to break up confidential files into encrypted chunks and distribute those pieces on computers also running the software. If someone wanted to download a copy of this encrypted file, he would have to download it simultaneously from many computers. This concept, Cohen thought, was perfect for a file sharing program, since programs like KaZaA take a long time to download a large file because the file is (usually) coming from one source (or "peer"). Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources, thus speeding up the download time, especially for users with faster download than upload speeds. Thus, the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users.
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