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“I wanted to make this software work, and to prove my concept for file sharing on the Internet,” Shawn said.

The only real problem was that Shawn had never written a program to run on Windows, the computer system used by just about everybody. So he started cramming Windows the way his fellow students were cramming for exams, drinking caffeine-laden soft drinks by the gallon and banging away on his laptop. It took just a few weeks, and the first rough version of Napster was done.

The most elegant sociological element of what would grow to eighty-thousand lines of code was that Napster both gave and took away. If you used the system to look for a song and then began downloading, the system would open your MP3 files to others at the same time unless you actively blocked it from doing so. Like magic, the more people who were seeking music, the more music would become available.

Another important innovation was the system architecture. Most huge stores of information are housed on databases controlled by a single computer server. While people can get access to that information from different places, the data is all mashed into one giant machine. With Napster, such a server would have been overwhelmed in minutes by all the space required for MP3s. Shawn wanted Napster to work more like such search engines as Google or AltaVista. Those search engines show you data anywhere on the Web that is reachable and that they can find, but they leave the data where it lies for you to retrieve. That meant Napster required central servers only to list who had possession of what, not to store the actual songs. At the peak in 2001, that would mean about 150 servers—not a number well into the thousands, affordable only by the biggest corporations.

From very early on, Shawn turned for help to his more experienced comrades on IRC. “I could always ask them a question about protocol design or just shoot a question to the channel and have somebody answer it. I wouldn’t have been able to write Napster without IRC and without these groups of people,” Shawn said. “The amount of time it would have taken me to find answers in books or find the resources I needed, I would never have finished it on time. I definitely owe it to a lot of people.”

Most of those people were on w00w00, the IRC channel founded in 1998 by Matt Conover, the sixteen-year-old hacker using the handle

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