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unnecessary complexity, because it didn't take full advantage of that language's advances over the more rudimentary C language, which Shawn understood better.

The server side of the program was another problem. W00w00's Evan Brewer managed the server system at first, but he loaded it up with multiple security programs. That would have made hacking the system harder, but it ate up memory and slowed the server to a crawl. After some harassment by Ritter, in late June Shawn turned control of the server over to him. Ritter wasn't getting paid anything, but he was expected to fix the system when it crashed, and he did. He was more interested in the program than the music; he doesn't remember what song he searched for first. Maybe something by Steely Dan.

Because the music itself was stored on client computers, Napster needed far fewer servers than it otherwise would. But the servers still had to route traffic and handle indexing and other complex functions. Ritter's solutions were elegant, according to Scott Shinn, the engineer Parker had met through Jonathon Perrelli at UUNet. “Shawn had the brilliant idea and prototyped it in a way that was practical,” said Shinn, who had helped put the White House and the Securities and Exchange Commission online and held senior technical positions at many firms, including Cisco Systems Inc. “He was able to put it together and put it in front of his little sisters and his grandmother and they would be able to use it. Jordan took what Shawn had put together and made it scale up to five hundred thousand users. Those are numbers AOL has to compete with, and AOL needs acres of equipment. Jordan did some really brilliant stuff.”

Shawn did some of the coding in his dorm at Northeastern during the week, then went full steam at his uncle's office in Hull on the weekends. He kept himself awake as long as possible to finish one piece or another of the Napster puzzle. One of the biggest challenges was an early attempt to link the multiple servers together, so that people could look for music, or each other, no matter which piece of the system they had signed onto. Shawn grew obsessed with figuring out how to do this, and he took advantage of a conveniently stored case of the ultracaffeinated soft drink Red Bull. (Ritter had another method for keeping the intense concentration needed for long stretches of programming: He took Ritalin, usually prescribed for children with attention deficit disorder.)

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