Heritage project
Linuxdown — Multi-Threaded Download Tool
Originally at gro.clinux.org/frs/download.php/1015 (linuxdown)
Linuxdown was a Chinese-community-developed command-line download manager that supported up to 30 parallel threads per download — a meaningful speed improvement over wget on the slower internet connections of the mid-2000s.
What it did
Linuxdown opened multiple TCP connections per download, requesting different byte ranges of the same file in parallel and reassembling them at completion. On servers that allowed multiple parallel connections per client (most did at the time), this produced substantially faster downloads than single-stream tools like wget.
Modern alternatives
aria2 has been the dominant maintained multi-threaded / multi-protocol download utility since the late 2000s and supersedes the use case Linuxdown originally addressed. Most modern Linux distributions ship aria2 in their default repositories.