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the peak, after programming for a year straight. I couldn't believe how much coding did in one night. It was just unbelievable. That was critical." The first version of the linking software was buggy, and it was never implemented. But it made the staff members feel that they were at least doing something to ward off Frankel's attack.

When Gnutella appeared nearly three months later, Napster's engineers were nervous but impressed. The system was much more complicated than Napster's. Instead of relying on a central server, Gnutella allowed users to create their own, smaller networks for searches. A request sent to one small network hub would be relayed to more hubs, and the geometric progression would reach a vast number of computers. The major advantage Gnutella had over Napster was that there wasn't what engineers refer to as a "single point of failure": There was no one machine, or small set of machines, on which everything else depended. In this case, of course, the fear was not a technical malfunction—the fear was legal action. Once Gnutella was in the wild, there was little the record industry could do about it. Gnutella was "unstoppable from a technological perspective," Shawn e-mailed his colleagues.

Gnutella also gave Napster some reasons for relief. It was nowhere near as easy to use as Napster was. And because of its technical structure, Gnutella had tremendous speed issues as its usage grew. The problem was that each inquiry multiplied as it ran through the decision tree. As the network grew larger, so did the multiplication, clogging up bandwidth and slowing everything down. While Gnutella got wide press, the initial version never got above ten thousand or twenty thousand users, Ritter said. As for Napster's precarious political position, Gnutella was a tremendous help. Since there was no way for the record companies to control Gnutella, Parker thought the labels might be willing to do a deal that would legitimize Napster and thereby keep that audience from turning to Gnutella and escaping their reach.

"It was the best thing that could have happened," Parker said. "We had been trying to get Eileen interested in using this idea as a threat to get a deal from Day One." If Gnutella hadn't been invented elsewhere, Parker said, Napster might even have tried to do the same thing itself, officially or covertly. In fact, he suggested, "it's entirely possible that someone from Napster gave Nullsoft the idea." That's a fairly

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