Anime has come a long way here in the states. Nearly a decade ago you had to rely on bootleggers. Extremely illegal only the desperate resorted to this. Then in 1996 when the Internet came out of the shadows of extreme dorkyness some people started hosting anime episodes on there personal sites. They weren't downloaded too much. During this time few channels ran anime. One I remember was a modernized version of Dragon Ball. It is the original 13 episodes but the sound and video were fixed a bit.
One huge contributor to this all was Cartoon Network. Toonami was introduced in 1997. It originally featured Superman, Batman, and all that crap. In 1998 though Toonami got the rights to Dragon Ball Z. That same year a game and show called Poke'mon came to the states and turned alot of heads. I was originally brought in too anime by poke'mon.
The Internet became a good place to find your anime. By downloading it for free your doing an illegal process so if you read this article and decide to D/L anime don't blame me. Anyways people hosted episodes on their websites but the big problem was bandwidth. So when Napster and other file sharing programs came out anime moved there. Finding the files was hard and inconsistent and the files spread slowly. Bit Torrent improved all of those. Bit torrents are compressed files that you can host tons of on your website and not lose bandwidth. They spread very fast because while your downloading you can have other people download at the same time.
Anime has become increasingly popular here. There are forums full of American kids in them. I've had classmates like this one who was fairly popular and I never expected this person to like any anime. Two years later I find this person loves anime. It goes to show