this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Google was not really popular in 99-01, nor did modems have the bandwidth to do two things at once effectively. How would you “get an idea”? Streaming audio barely existed outside of some RealPlayer things.
If your comment was about Kazaa, I’d agree. It’s about Napster which puts it about 5 years off imo.
Nah, Google was a thing by the time Napster was around. If you were hip enough to know about one you probably knew about the other. You'd get an idea by figuring out what genre the artist was, reading reviews, just seeing where discussion was taking place. Not by listening to it, you'd have to queue it up to download and wait while hoping your source didn't go offline before it downloaded. And yes, even at 56k you could load and read text while downloading MP3s, it was just slow.
I dunno, I was active in piracy at this time and many, many more people knew about Napster than Google. Napster was news worthy in 1999; Google was not. Google is much more of a 00s phenomenon. You’ve got 9/11 between the two. Napster happened before all that.
It could be all in how I used it, but I’d herald the beginning of discovery right there with the widespread availability of 5Mbps cable broadband in the US, so early 00s, right there with the rise of Google. Napster is a bit early for that IMO. I understand you could but most people didn’t as 56k speeds really limited discovery by library browsing, not to mention poor tagging / file name etiquette.
By the time DC++ had risen in popularity, around 03-04, this was prime time library browsing piracy times.
Eh, whether or not we agree or disagree, it was fun to recall the early days of my journey. Have a good one.