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with a handful of people from the w00w00 channel. Conover initially disapproved of the way others in his group had glommed onto Napster. “I was opposed to it,” he said. “To me, it was leeching off the success of a member. It bothered me at the time.” But he had no idea how important the program was going to be. If he had realized it then, Conover admitted later, he would have been right there debugging the code with the rest of them. “I didn’t want to sell out cheap,” he said. “Now I regret it.”

McGann was one of the earliest testers of the beta version of Napster. At one point, he, Shawn, and two other people were the only ones using the program. The system was poorly set up back then, using no database software to house the lists of songs. It was buggy and would freeze up for no apparent reason. But McGann, who had little patience for tracking down MP3s on IRC channels, realized he still could triple his music collection in weeks. While he was testing the system, he sent Shawn a private e-mail. “Do you realize that this is going to change everything?” he wrote. “Yeah, I know,” Shawn replied. McGann gave Shawn some sample code for recognizing songs by electronic tags. And he copied the system for his roommate, a nonhacker who couldn’t believe his good fortune. It was just so easy to use, the roommate told others. And the smooth give-and-take of music could be almost hypnotic. The word kept spreading, and others logged on before Shawn’s system was ready for them.

Outside of the w00w00 circle, Shawn was chatting about his invention with his old friend Sean Parker on another IRC channel called “dweebs.” And Parker, being Parker, immediately started thinking about how to make a business out of it, regardless of the fact that the code was still buggy. Shawn “had very little business acumen,” Parker said. “He just wanted to code it.” Parker had a point: With more and more people coming aboard, the system needed money for more servers.

Back in Boston, Ritter was getting more interested in Shawn’s code from another angle. He peppered Shawn’s e-mail address with one-line questions about the code. Finally, Shawn showed him what he had written. There were some obvious bugs, which Ritter fixed, and the programming was raw. Among other things, it was written in C++ with

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