Whatever Madonna song that had "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" prepended to it.

It was a Magnetic Fields song off "69 Love Songs," sometime in the summer of 2002. (Late to the party as always.) This girl I liked was into them, and I had never heard of them, so I downloaded a bunch so I could talk about my favorite Magnetic Fields songs.

The first (and legal) one was "I Don't Want No Cybersex" by Mojo Nixon. The first napster one...god, I don't remember.

Discovering that my work had a (then) ginormous 50gb server on the LAN dedicated to mp3s for streaming and sharing. This was just pre-napster, winamp 1.0 days, when 10 g HDs were huge and expensive. (I think the server was 10 drives or something, in a RAID array.) I still have copies of those mp3s in multiple locations, and I find it fascinating that I could now easily copy that entire server twice on one drive. And that my personal collection now exceeds that.

When I pop my cherry I usually go huge or go home.

College LAN. I missed the whole Napster thing... it seemed to happen during the period my whack-ass college had no dorm internet. Once we finally got a network, everyone had massive stores up on the Windows LAN and I got to copying left and right.

When I wasn't playing Tribes. So uh... never.

The Firm, Star Trekkin. Someone sent it to me and I had to find a program that played these "mp3s".

Oh, I remember my napster epiphany vividly. It was July 23, 2000 - I had been reading about this new "MP3" stuff, and napster kept getting mentioned, so I decided to see what it was all about. I loaded the program, chose a username, and typed in the first song that came to mind - "Beck - Loser". Hundreds of choices filled the screen. I clicked one, and within minutes (this was 56K, remember) I was listening to the song. I just stared at the screen for a few moments as the ramifications of what I had just done rolled around in my head. Finally, I called my wife to come down and see this miracle for herself.

I told her to name a song, any song. She chose "Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party". I repeated the process for her, and again, within minutes, we were listening to that very song. She got the same open-mouthed expression I had earlier, and said two sentences I don't think I will ever forget:

"Oh my God, the record companies HAVE to shut this down!"
"We have to get as much as we can before they do!"

Within a week, I had bought a CD burner.

I can't remember the track, but it was something by Hendrix (The wind cries Mary?) and would have been in about 2002 (late to the party also).

Like yhbc, my better half and I were floored by the widespread availablity of free music and proceeded to grab everything we could - often leaving the PC on for days at a time, downloading dozens of tracks at once via a dial-up connection, thereby cutting ourselves off from contact by phone. We just couldn't belive it would last.

It was this.

Sheesh, I can't possibly remember now. I didn't do lots of downloading until really recently, though, mainly because my hard drives are always full of pr0n games and work. In 2001 I was managing a network where they had let Napster sneak in (they were a "cool" dot com) and half the workers were running it, and I had to actually restrict traffic on the port so we didn't max our bandwidth. That was the point at which I thought it was odd that you couldn't Napster internally, sorta the way iTunes lets you share music. I was going to use admin rights to trawl through everybody's collections, but then my contract wasn't renewed.

Funny, back then I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
With music, I mean. Networks, I was fine with.

I really don’t remember either, even though I was another relative latecomer, so it wasn’t all that long ago: probably late ’01 or early ’02. I missed out on the whole napster thing. I think morpheus was the first p2p app I used.

Oh, it was Kazaa that I used. I must start reading questions before I answer them.

I remember using Napster over a modem and not being very impressed - dunno what I downloaded but I know it took a bloody long time.

When I finally got ADSL I started using Audiogalaxy, and that was the dogs bollocks. And do you know what, I probably spent more money on CDs during that time then any other, there was just so much great stuff to discover. One really cool thing was that when me and the missus would come home late from the pub I'd plug the laptop into the hifi, crank it up and then download and play almost any track we could think of. While playing one track I'd be downloading two more and the music would be going all night. Trying doing that with torrents.

I'm not much into downloading these days.

and that was the dogs bollocks

I'm not sure; is this a good or a bad thing???

The first one I downloaded was the ripped audio off of a performance on the Late Show w/ David Letterman (Loreena McKennitt, to be specific) from someone's personal website. This was late 1998, I believe. I soon had acquired Breakfast at Tiffany's from another website, and quickly thereafter installed Napster, and started downloading everything I could think of, much like the commish, knowing it wouldn't last.

These days? USENET, baby. It's the wave of the future. the future. the wave of the future. the wave of the future.

The Knife Feels Like Justice, by Brian Setzer. I got it to replace my worn out cassette, and since the label doesn't make it readily available (or didn't then), I guess it's legal.

Bollocks is a bad thing, dog's bollocks are a good thing.

Also, us getting linguistic independence from people who enjoy dog's balls = very good thing. I imagine the scene in a contemporary boardroom thusly:

"Morning, Johnson. How was your weekend?"
"Oh, it was great, Larry. It was just like a dog licking its own balls."
". . ."

dorm LAN...Grateful Dead Show...1998