Looking for info on what happened to NMDC and what ptokax can do

[Speeddymon]

It's been quite some time since I've used DC, and I was discussing with some co-workers about old file sharing things that we've used; one guy mentioned Hotline, which reminded me, somehow, of NMDC. So that prompted me to start looking around to figure out whatever happened to it. The only information I can find is the web.archive.org cache of the NMDC home page from May, 2005, and wikipedia entry stating that it ran until 2005.. Nothing indicates why or when it actually went offline, and of course, you have to dig some to find clients, such as this, which are still kept up to date.

Questions I have are as follows:

When and why did NMDC shut down their homepage and operations?
Does ptokax support the filesharing aspect, and how about SSL and using custom ports?

I can find my own hub lists but I'd like to get back into sharing without dealing with bittorrent, so I'm hoping to keep an encrypted connection for my data to not be able to be monitored.

[PPK]

As you found, neo-modus website was shutdown in 2005. Why ? Only John Hess (creator of Direct Connect) know that.
PtokaX is hub-software, not client. So it is not supporting any filesharing, that is client job.
No PtokaX don't support SSL, actually SSL is not secure anymore so support for it is not even planned
PtokaX allow to use any port(s) you want :