Who Created Napster?
It all began with the birth of an idea in the spring of 1999. Shawn Fanning, a teenager at the time, was on the web messaging service Internet Relay Chat (IRC). He was surfing on a channel called w00w00, which was a hacker network. He was going by the username “Napster,” a nickname he earned from some trash talking guy on the basketball court who was making fun of his hair.
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He told his Internet group about this program he was working on that would make it really easy for people to send and receive music files, like MP3s. He turned to a guy named Jordan Ritter, a 20-year-old security programmer, for help. Ritter, who went by the username “Nocarrier,” would be the founding architect of Napster.