Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Napster Nostalgia
Last night at Optimo, they1 played Theme For Great Cities by Simple Minds - don’t be put off by the band’s later dross, it’s a cracking tune - and my first thought was, ‘Hah, I remember the night I downloaded this off Napster!’
Sad get that I am, this promted a rush of happy memories of staring at the slow creep of a progress bar, desperately hoping that the file would download completely, and that my shaky 56k connection would hold up for the half hour needed to grab a single song. And then there were the emails from friends, or postings on message boards, pointing to files on the network right now, that you just had to get, straight away, no messing about.
Of course, I wouldn’t like to go back to the benighted days before broadband, with Napster the only way I knew of to find the rare or brand new music I’d never get to hear otherwise, but, despite and because of the difficulty in actually bloody sharing files, filesharing was more fun, and more of a social activity (like real life record shopping) back then. These days, it’s just too easy!
1 - I say ‘they’ because I’m not sure which disc jockey played it, but since one seemed to be channelling the spirit of the late, great Trade resident Tony De Vit last night, I’d guess it was the other!
I’m sure like many world changing events, people never forget when and where they first discovered Napster :)
In 1999, I was one of a team working in our own little room at * Uni. In the corner we had a ‘testing’ machine that stayed dormant most of the time. It was also connected to the University’s rather fast T1 connection, and, after discovering the joys of Napster, we filled its 7 gig drive with lots of fantastic music in no time.
Unfortunately, 6 months later, the machine had to be taken away for repairs and a clean re-install, and with no means of backing-up our cache, we had to say goodbye to our jukebox in the corner. Those were the days though.
Posted by Matt at 8pm on 12.07.04
Napster and a T1 connection? Wowsers - that must’ve been fun…
…people never forget when and where they first discovered Napster
Quite - Bittorrent just lacks romance somehow ; )
Posted by Jack at 12pm on 14.07.04