Some Light Relief—Napster and LimeWire
Everyone knows the story of Napster by this point. College student Shawn Fanning (baby nickname: “the napster” because of his sleeping habits) threw together some rickety old Windows software to transmit the titles of any music tracks you had on your PC to a central database.
Other users could search that database looking for titles they wanted. When they found a match, the Napster software would set up a peer-to-peer connection and allow direct transfer of the music bits from your PC to the unknown fan elsewhere. Your incentive to share was that you in turn would be able to get files from other people similarly sharing their titles.
That was the concept at least. In practice, the record companies and ...
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