Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first computer to run the BitTorrent protocol was a University at Buffalo machine on the 2nd of July 2001. Programmer Bram Cohen designed the system to fundamentally alter how data moves across the internet.
Programmer Bram Cohen created the BitTorrent protocol and he is an alumnus of the University at Buffalo. Cohen spent months designing a system that turned every downloader into an uploader to create a decentralized swarm.
BitTorrent accounted for a third of all internet traffic by 2004. The initial release laid the groundwork for a technology that eventually handled massive spikes in traffic known as flash crowds.
The first torrent index sites emerged as a necessity to host lists of .torrent files that users could download to connect to the swarm. Public sites like The Pirate Bay became the de facto search engines for the network.
Comcast was caught interfering with BitTorrent communications in 2007, leading to a public truce and a broader debate about net neutrality in the United States. The protocol does not offer anonymity by default, exposing users' IP addresses to everyone in the swarm.
BitTorrent v2 was released in 2017 and it replaced the outdated SHA-1 hash function with the more secure SHA-256. The update also introduced a hash tree to speed up the process of adding torrents and allowed for more granular checks for file corruption.