Sandpiper Networks
A California company that ran a CDN before Akamai had launched one — and that history mostly remembers as a footnote to Akamai's.
Sandpiper, based in Thousand Oaks, California, launched its Footprint service in 1998: customers' images and files were placed on servers spread across the network, and DNS steered each visitor to the nearest copy. That is the core idea of a CDN, and Sandpiper was in operation before Akamai's commercial launch in 1999.
Akamai, however, had the money, the maths and the big customers. Sandpiper was acquired by Digital Island around the turn of 2000, and its content-delivery patents travelled with the business through a series of owners. They were used in patent fights against Akamai for more than a decade — a longer afterlife than the service itself got.