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with a customer whose computer server he had configured—Ben Lilienthal, who nearly became Napster's first real CEO.

While Parker spun visions of how the Web could work better and who could help him realize those dreams, his friend Shawn Fanning was experimenting with code and tossing around technical ideas in w00w00 a few hundred miles to the north. In his freshman year at college, Shawn's roommate complained that nearly every time he looked for an MP3, the link to the digital file was dead and the music was gone. There had to be some way to fix that, Shawn thought.

a big idea

by the earlier 1990s, when shawn fanning started at boston's northeastern university, the digital music era still was not yet on the horizon. while mp3 had become its standard, growing in popularity largely because they weren't encumbered by electronic security or copy controls, file sharing services offered a limited array of service. on the internet, including mp3 news, alt.binaries.sounds.misc, and others, fans could trade music, but the hassle was profound. sonic data in directories were notoriously transient; they would vanish over time. other sites required passwords to keep loops of files in transit—the favored community for transporting files. it was barely worth the effort to rip. "the tracks would, I found, disappear very fast," he told authors when questioned. "shawn would recall. i began thinking about ways to solve the distributed file problem."

napster was wrong-way, it was in the weeds on the consumer computer, decentralized across servers all over the world. the entire price of that world

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