But then there was the Internet—a portal to a different world. It arrived in Glover’s trailer from outer space. In the fall of 1996, Hughes Network Systems introduced the country’s first consumer-grade satellite broadband, and Dell Glover had signed up almost the first day it was available. The service offered download speeds of up to 400 kilobits per second, nearly ten times the speed of even the best dial-up modem. The old bulletin board systems were being left behind, replaced by the interconnected universe of the World Wide Web.

Tony Dockery was an early adopter too, and together the two friends explored this new digital frontier. Dockery, more intrepid, showed a certain talent for finding the outlandish and the fetishistic, the outré and the bizarre. Glover, a creature of habit, stayed closer to home. In truth, he found the Web of 1996 a little boring. There was no social media, no e-commerce, no video, no Wikipedia. The typical Web page was a half-finished collection of dead links with the words “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” plastered across the top in blinking text, flanked by two animated gifs of flashing police lights. Everything was ugly and hard to navigate. Yahoo!, the Web’s leading search engine, was just an indexed collection of links, presented in a cluttered blue-on-white color scheme that was about as fun to read as an income tax form.

The real action, they both soon found, was somewhere else: chat rooms. Specifically, Internet Relay Chat, a constellation of privately owned and operated servers that predated the more corporatized channels of the Web by years. Leaving the Web for IRC was like walking out of an air-conditioned mall and into an open-air drug market. You created a user name and joined a channel, indicated by a hash mark: #politics, #sex, #computers, etc. The channels were loosely moderated and not beholden to any centralized authority, and nothing seemed off-limits.

Glover and Dockery became chat addicts, and on some days, even after 14 hours in each other’s company, the two hung out in the same chat channel after work. Except, on IRC, Dockery wasn’t Dockery: he was “Jah Jah,” or sometimes “StJames.” And Glover wasn’t Glover: he was “Darkman” or, more commonly, by playing off his initials, “ADEG.”

The sense of anonymity was exhilarating, although perhaps illusory. In exploring the technology, Glover and Dockery soon learned that it was possible to “ping” other users and trace their Internet Protocol addresses. These IP addresses acted like the PO boxes of old: while you couldn’t know exactly who the person was behind them, you could figure out what Internet provider they used, and get a general sense of geographic location.

There were ways to mask one’s IP address, of course. The technically adept could even spoof their locations, and suddenly appear to be chatting from address blocks in Antarctica or North Korea. But Glover and Dockery didn’t bother with this. Part of the appeal of IRC was the opportunity to interact with strangers from all over the world. Glover did not have a passport and hardly ever left the South. Even the state of Virginia, a hundred miles to the north, was a distant frontier. But this new technology brought the world to his kitchen and, true to the promise of its breathless evangelists, provided the opportunity to forge new digital communities of friendship and respect, where historical considerations of culture and geography were suddenly obsolesced.

Also, you could share files. Both Glover and Dockery had participated in file-sharing subculture from the bulletin board days, and had passed around floppy disks full of cracked shareware through the postal service. Getting a disk in the mail—or, less commonly, in a hand-to-hand transfer—was like Christmas morning, with royalty-free versions of Duke Nukem and Wing Commander under the tree. Now, on IRC, every day was Christmas, with a preprogrammed script known as a “bot” playing the role of automated Santa, instantly filling your wish list of cracked files on demand. With satellite download, you could fill your 1-gigabyte hard drive with pirated software in a matter of hours.

The cracked files were known as “warez,” an ironic derivation of “software.” Warez was a singular term; it was also a plural one, and a subculture, and a lifestyle. Soon Glover was spending a lot of time in IRC’s #warez channel—too much time, as he later would admit. Before it became a widespread phenomenon, Glover was addicted to the Internet. In addition to the street bikes and the pit bulls and the Quad Squad, there were now the continuing online adventures of ADEG.

In later years he wouldn’t quite remember exactly when he’d found it. The Internet had a hypnotic effect that seemed to dilate the flow of time. Probably it was late in 1996, or maybe early in 1997, when Glover first heard the good news: not only was there a brisk trade in pirated software, but there existed a growing channel for pirated music as well. This perplexed Glover, who knew from memory that a compact disc held more than 700 megabytes of data. Doing the mental arithmetic, he figured that it would take nearly an hour to download a CD, and the resulting file would take up more than 70 percent of his computer’s storage. Trading pirated music was a technical possibility, he supposed, but an impractical one.

But Glover was directed to a new IRC channel: #mp3. There, among thousands upon thousands of users, engaged in complex technical chatter and trading profane, often racially charged insults, he found CD music files that had somehow been shrunk to one-twelfth of their original size. Those warez guys, it turned out, didn’t just pirate software. Music, games, magazines, pictures, pornography, fonts—they pirated anything that could be compressed.

They called this subculture “The Warez Scene,” or, more commonly, just “The Scene.” Scene members organized themselves into loosely affiliated digital crews, and those crews raced one another to be the first to release newly pirated material. Often this material was available the same day it was officially released. Sometimes it was even possible, by hacking company servers, or by accessing unscrupulous employees or vendors, to pirate a piece of software before it was available in stores. These prerelease leaks were called “zero-day” warez, and the ability to regularly source them earned one the ultimate accolade in digital piracy: to be among the “elite.”

Now the Scene was moving from software to music, and it was their enthusiasm for the technology that sparked the mp3 craze. The first industrial-scale mp3 pirate was a Scene player by the screen name “NetFraCk,” who, in September 1996, offered an interview to Affinity, an underground Scene newsletter, which like the earliest cracked software, was distributed through snail mail on a 3.5-inch floppy disk.

AFT: Please tell us about this new concept in releasing. We have all seen utils/games release groups before. But, CD music? Who thought of this idea?

NFK: I’ve thought of the idea of somehow pirating music. However I never had the means to do so until now. The problem in the past with pirating music was HD space the only means to distribute the music was in the WAV format. That tends to get huge. Especially if you an average song. We eliminated the size constraints. We use a new format to compress our music. The MP3 format. [sic]

Using Fraunhofer’s L3Enc encoder, NetFraCk had started a new crew, the world’s first ever digital music piracy group: Compress ’Da Audio, or CDA for short. (The name was a play on the three-letter .cda filename extension Windows used for audio compact discs.) On August 10, 1996, CDA had released to IRC the world’s first “officially” pirated mp3: “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica, off their album Load. Within weeks, there were numerous rival crews and thousands of pirated songs.