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Comment by bitterfounder0 | Hacker News Reader

My college used DC++ to internally share music, movies, tv shows, and porn. You could browse someones entire media collection. It gave you an overall sense for their taste in music and was a great way to find new bands. Reading about Napster reminded me how much I miss this feature.

The article glosses over how slow Napster '99 was. I remember waiting a couple hours to download an album. Fast downloads are more important than social features. I do not miss Napster.

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RE: slow downloads thru Napster

Of course, high speed internet is much more prevalent now in 2012 than it was in '99. Downloading an album in '99 sometimes meant you were downloading from PC's with only a 56k modem for connectivity.

Good point. It's not fair to associate Napster with slow download speeds. I would have loved to see how Napster evolved with broadband. Tragic they were shutdown.

In countries such as Sweden that was already the case. I never downloaded anything on napster in 56k-speed unless I was really desperate. Broadband was common enough that limiting yourself to high-speed downloads didn't limit the supply, which was kind of obvious considering that those with broadband typically had many orders of magnitude larger libraries :p

To be fair, this was the age of dial-up, not broadband.

It was broadband (well, high speed LAN) on college campuses.

I disagree. 97-99 were the years of massive broadband cable rollout to suburban America. This was the time that broadband arrived, and you see it reflected in the software of that era particularly video games for example Quake, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Ultima Online, Everquest. It was the boom of real time multiplayer, which required a broadband connection.

And now, my university uses Mojo to browse and download an entire users collection. It works incredibly well, and you really do get to know people. I remember meeting someone a year after downloading almost a 1/3rd of their library, and being able to talk right away.

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