The early internet kept showing us the future, and we rolled our eyes every time

In Tales of the Early Internet, Mashable explores online life through 2007 — back before social media and the smartphone changed everything.

"The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed," William Gibson famously wrote in 2003. With the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we can add this about the era he was describing: the future was also unevenly believed. Even when it was right in front of us, we couldn't see it through our assumptions. This was especially true of the things we were most passionate about.

Everyone who was extremely online back in the late 1990s and early 2000s lost themselves to some new obsession when we got our first high-speed internet connection at home. Often it was an obsession that seemed somewhat illicit at the time, and utterly quaint now. For me, as for millions, that obsession was music — and acquiring it on Napster.

This was spring of 2000; dotcom mania was in full swing, and I'd just moved to San Francisco to cover it for Time magazine. The moment Pacific Bell hooked up my first DSL line, I couldn't resist downloading the bad boy of music sharing — we'd just put Napster on the cover — and soon saw what the fuss was about. More than 30 million people freely sharing music collections on the same server: This was something new in the world. It was the first cultural bazaar where everything was available, instant and free. One night I asked my visiting British dad to name a tune it might not have.

"'My Old Man's a Dustman' by Lonnie Donegan," he replied gruffly, almost like he regretted making the challenge too hard. He scoffed at the likelihood of finding it. Ping! Donegan downloaded 30 seconds later.

WATCH: Revisiting the website that shaped the internet

While I was knee-deep in Napster, RealNetworks in Seattle kept pitching story ideas on Rhapsody, its first-in-the-world music subscription service. That was my cue to scoff. Rhapsody was a meager thing then, with music from a few labels and none of the majors. And a subscription? Who on Earth would pay $10 a month to stream music they could get for free on Napster, or via ripping their own and their friends' entire CD collections, as I was doing at a rapid clip on an ever-expanding rack of external hard drives?

Even if Napster went away — and users did tend to download like they were running out of time, well aware the courts would catch up to Napster sooner or later – there would be LimeWire and Kazaa. Not as fast or as user-friendly, since they weren't hosted on a single company's servers, but still free. Hey, I thought, maybe Steve Jobs would make good on that idea we kept discussing in interviews, about how the labels should just get it together and sell songs for 99 cents a pop.

"Subscriptions miss the point; we are an acquisitive species, homo consumer," I wrote at the time. "We want to own our stuff forever. That includes digital music."

Well, mea culpa on that prediction. Fast forward two decades and here I am paying more than 10 bucks a month for Spotify, the service that has best realized the Rhapsody dream so far. It is almost Napster-like in the completeness of its library, annoying gaps notwithstanding. It is synched and available instantly on devices in my pocket, at my desk, on my couch. My playlists are downloaded for offline listening, which turns out to be enough to scratch my acquisitive itch. Even though there's no real sense in which I own this music; I'm shelling out for ongoing borrowing rights, essentially.

And that carefully-curated library, the fruit of years of CD ripping plus illicit downloading plus a few hundred purchased tracks? Well, it still exists, though it seems to have lost a few more tracks every time iTunes upgraded into a newer, more bloated form over the years. I dip into it a couple times a month on average, compared to every day for Spotify.

And here's what would have really blown my mind in the year 2000: Rhapsody still exists now, in 2020, in 34 countries, under a different name, ...

In Tales of the Early Internet, Mashable explores online life through 2007 — back before social media and the smartphone changed everything.

"The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed," William Gibson famously wrote in 2003. With the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we can add this about the era he was describing: the future was also unevenly believed. Even when it was right in front of us, we couldn't see it through our assumptions. This was especially true of the things we were most passionate about.

Everyone who was extremely online back in the late 1990s and early 2000s lost themselves to some new obsession when we got our first high-speed internet connection at home. Often it was an obsession that seemed somewhat illicit at the time, and utterly quaint now. For me, as for millions, that obsession was music — and acquiring it on Napster.

This was spring of 2000; dotcom mania was in full swing, and I'd just moved to San Francisco to cover it for Time magazine. The moment Pacific Bell hooked up my first DSL line, I couldn't resist downloading the bad boy of music sharing — we'd just put Napster on the cover — and soon saw what the fuss was about. More than 30 million people freely sharing music collections on the same server: This was something new in the world. It was the first cultural bazaar where everything was available, instant and free. One night I asked my visiting British dad to name a tune it might not have.

"'My Old Man's a Dustman' by Lonnie Donegan," he replied gruffly, almost like he regretted making the challenge too hard. He scoffed at the likelihood of finding it. Ping! Donegan downloaded 30 seconds later.

WATCH: Revisiting the website that shaped the internet

While I was knee-deep in Napster, RealNetworks in Seattle kept pitching story ideas on Rhapsody, its first-in-the-world music subscription service. That was my cue to scoff. Rhapsody was a meager thing then, with music from a few labels and none of the majors. And a subscription? Who on Earth would pay $10 a month to stream music they could get for free on Napster, or via ripping their own and their friends' entire CD collections, as I was doing at a rapid clip on an ever-expanding rack of external hard drives?

Even if Napster went away — and users did tend to download like they were running out of time, well aware the courts would catch up to Napster sooner or later – there would be LimeWire and Kazaa. Not as fast or as user-friendly, since they weren't hosted on a single company's servers, but still free. Hey, I thought, maybe Steve Jobs would make good on that idea we kept discussing in interviews, about how the labels should just get it together and sell songs for 99 cents a pop.

"Subscriptions miss the point; we are an acquisitive species, homo consumer," I wrote at the time. "We want to own our stuff forever. That includes digital music."

Well, mea culpa on that prediction. Fast forward two decades and here I am paying more than 10 bucks a month for Spotify, the service that has best realized the Rhapsody dream so far. It is almost Napster-like in the completeness of its library, annoying gaps notwithstanding. It is synched and available instantly on devices in my pocket, at my desk, on my couch. My playlists are downloaded for offline listening, which turns out to be enough to scratch my acquisitive itch. Even though there's no real sense in which I own this music; I'm shelling out for ongoing borrowing rights, essentially.

And that carefully-curated library, the fruit of years of CD ripping plus illicit downloading plus a few hundred purchased tracks? Well, it still exists, though it seems to have lost a few more tracks every time iTunes upgraded into a newer, more bloated form over the years. I dip into it a couple times a month on average, compared to every day for Spotify.

And here's what would have really blown my mind in the year 2000: Rhapsody still exists now, in 2020, in 34 countries, under a different name, ...