File Sharing: A People's History

I was fortunate to have vivid memories of the earliest stages of file sharing, which I'll now share to the world. I'm only going from memory here. There's no Wikipedia or Encarta involved.



I first started filesharing when Napster dropped, I think it was in 2000 or so. I remember the first few songs I downloaded were Ruff Ryders Anthem and some Jay-Z songs. It was pretty fast on the Internet we had at home. I used it in conjunction with Winamp, the wildly underrated music player of the time.



I don't remember why I stopped using Napster, probably when they got sued in a year or two. I switched over to Kazaa or Morpheus, which I relied on until college. They were pretty useful and reliable, I only had to BearShare once in a while. Most of my music collection was not put together until college, when I met the Marlin. He opened my eyes to so many new things. No romo.



Freshman year of college was a bukkake in more ways than one, including file sharing. Some of you may remember i2hub. It was the Holy Grail of illegal downloads. If I remember correctly, it was based on a private network between colleges, which made it blazingly fast. There were legendary users on i2hub with petabytes of data, like EVERY Star Trek episode, EVERY Seinfeld episode, etc. The vast majority of my music and my first porn collection were products of i2hub. But, all good things must come to an end, and one day, i2hub was shut down. No goodbye. No "see you later." No nothing. It was devastating, and the school's mostly-useless student's government sought an answer.



Enter Ruckus. It began with anyone at certain colleges, but finally opened up to anyone with a .edu email address. It was perfectly legal, as the songs were protected with digital licenses. However, it did not take long for some Swedish or German kid to develop Tunebite, which allowed us to turn these useless WMA files into MP3s. The download times were quick, but converting took a while, usually overnight. I still took it for all it was worth until Ruckus was also shut down.



I don't download music music en masse anymore, but when I do get single tracks, it's from Ares. The Professor's been using it for a while and I just picked it up. It's not terribly fast, but it seems to have everything I'm looking for. It's a solid, steady program. I highly recommend it. When I'm looking for movies, I just defer to my brethern on Belle Avenue, as they have better connections (I think RealistNiggaz.com has good stuff, but I can't check at work for obvious reasons). Porn is a completely different matter, one that got its own column a while back. Enjoy.