Download Accelerator Plus

» see speedbit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

DAP was on every Windows machine I sat in front of between about 2000 and 2005, at home on the modem and in the internet cafes later. Nobody chose it exactly. It arrived with something else, or a friend put it on, and then it was simply the thing that opened when you clicked a link ending in .mp3 or .zip.

What it did was straightforward and, on a bad line, close to miraculous. A normal browser download was one connection pulling bytes in order, and if the line dropped at 94 percent you got nothing and started over. DAP opened several connections to the same file, had each one fetch a different range, and stitched the pieces together at the end. On a server that allowed it, the file arrived meaningfully faster. On a line that dropped, which in Turkey in 2002 was most lines, it picked up where it had stopped instead of throwing away twenty minutes.

SpeedBit was founded in Israel in 1999 and DAP was what it was founded to sell. There was a free version paid for with an ad panel in the window and a Premium version that removed it. Later releases added a scheduler and an option to shut the computer down once the queue finished. The company's own about page claimed more than a hundred and eighty million installs across its products, which is a marketing number but not an absurd one for something that spent fifteen years bundled into everything.

~ the case file ~

~ why it worked ~

Range requests were in HTTP since 1.1, and DAP's whole business was that almost nobody's browser used them properly and almost every server supported them. It was not clever technology. It was a gap between what the protocol allowed and what the default client bothered to do, held open for over a decade, and a company was built inside that gap.

The gap closed slowly and then completely. Browsers learned to resume, and connections got fast enough that splitting a download into eight streams stopped producing a difference anyone could feel. By the time a 4 megabyte file took four seconds, nothing about DAP's premise was still true.

~ the bundle problem ~

The other half of why DAP is remembered is less kind. Free download managers of that era were paid for by their installers, and DAP's carried third-party toolbars that also rewrote your home page, ticked by default and easy to miss. A generation of Turkish users learned what a hijacked browser was through this class of program, and DAP was one of the biggest of them.

That is a real part of the record, and it is also why the thing survived commercially as long as it did. The download manager was what got you to run the installer, and the installer was where the revenue was.

~ the next chapter ~

Version 10.0.6.0 shipped on 21 July 2014 and nothing shipped after it. No announcement went up and no final-version notice was ever posted. The site stayed live for another nine years selling a product that had stopped being updated, still running the promo graphic from January 2013 with FREE written on a blue circle.

speedbit.com was last archived on 9 December 2023 and does not resolve now. The idea outlived the company: a torrent client pulling one file from forty peers and a CDN doing parallel range fetches are both running the trick DAP ran on a 33.6k line, without anyone having to install it.

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