25 years ago, on June 1 1999, Shawn Fanning’s idea of a peer-to-peer file sharing network was born after he teamed up with his teenage chat room pal and self-taught tech genius Sean Parker. The pair’s program, Napster (Fanning’s hacker screen name), allowed anyone with a free account to share music from their hard drives with all other Napster members, instantly creating the world’s largest and completely downloadable free music library. Numbers grew rapidly, and at its height Napster had
…
Read more