I remember attempting to make a torrent of the then newly released Slackware 8.0 ISO, almost within a few days of bittorent's release.

It took another year before you could find enough content to use it though. eDonkey had all the good materials, but people were moving over to KaZaa. I think Bittorent took off after people got tired of moding KaZaa and removing the spyware; KaZaa-Lite worked until ~2003, but after that bittorent took over.