And the system is as old as the first day of the Internet, according to the expert, Tom Agoston, IBM's Somers, New York-based Global Services department.

Agoston, in a paper presented to 1,500 high tech delegates gathered in Honolulu, said that systems like the music-oriented Napster web site, essentially link computers to each other in a direct person-to-person, or in his parlance "peer-to peer" (P2P) manner, instead of having the music drawn from a large server.

The University of California, Berkeley ­based Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program also uses some 3 million individual computers, mostly home-based simple desktops, to combine to form a computer power greater than the sum of its parts.

P2P systems that connect "smart clients" with other "smart clients," such as in business-to-business arrangements that don't have the users rooting around in a server, will, he told The Earth Times, expand rapidly and " shake up the telecommunications industry, shake up information technology, and shake up content providers."

It is, he said, the wave of the future-- as it was in the past.

"The original Internet was a peer-to-peer architecture," he said. It simply connected one computer to another­ before the days of websites.

"The advent of the World Wide Web drove the Internet to look more like a ' client-server' model ‹ with "hosts" serving Š data to "clients," usually browsers such as Netscape's Navigator," he said.

Now with decentralization, he said, "the trend over the last decade Š has been away from monolithic systems and toward distributed systems."

"The Internet's growth, followed by the rise in importance of B2B (business-to business) transactions, made full-scale distributed computing a business necessity," he said.

An early example, he said, was USENET which still uses the same technology with which it started in 1979.

He said this came about because of more powerful-networked computers, and less expensive and more powerful interconnectivity.

Newer uses of the P2P technology, either to share data, to collaborate, or to help in computation include NASA's Information Power Grid, AOL's Instant Messenger, and Microsoft's NetMeeting, which allows live online meetings from computer-to-computer.

"The phenomenon will grow further when Sony's next generation Playstation 3 (PS3) game machines ship," he said. The game will allow players to compete with each other and with multiple other participants, in real time, over the Internet.

"This architecture can be very disruptive," he said. "In some universities about 30 per cent of the computer capacity is taken up with downloading music. Napster uses huge amounts of capacity."

"But it can also do a tremendous lot of social good," he said, citing as an example Entropia which uses the power of individual desktops to research why some strains of AIDS are resistant to drugs.