I did the same thing Max... Back in 2006. I thought it was really cool tech. I was equally surprised when this other Ripple company showed up and was giving away a new XRP token to Boinc participants. If I'd put a few hundred $ into XRP back then if be retired already.

I believe that Ripple Inc bought the original Ripple IOU system - or it was some of the original founders?

Interestingly we are basically reinventing the original Ripple concept with payment channels off the ETH and BTC blockchains (Raiden and Lightning). I think that validates the original idea was sound. Only dPoS based blockchains are doing anything different that doesn't need channels, because they are just fundamentally fast in the first place.