Yes, Gene, Justin, Shawn all somewhat knew one another. Street raced and hung out online. I started infrasearch with Gene. He also did an open source shoutcast server.
Napster came along to the nullsoft channel one day and shared the app he was working on. We all played with it and offered suggestions. Told him he was be sued out of existence. From that came gnutella and waste. Something was spun out with me and friends as infrasearch and sold to sun. Wilson Sonsini did a good thing on peer-to-peer back in the day too. They were our lawyers. Sucked us dry.
It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.
It started as a clone of the camelcamelcamel Amazon price history site and got kicked out by Amazon for abusing the system. It pivoted to a coupon site and started sucking down user data with the plugin when PayPal paid $4Bil CASH. Honey cost me affiliate marketing commissions.
I reviewed 1000s of skins and plugins at nullsoft before aol so many of them tie to a time in my life. Feels odd seeing them sometimes. Nullsoft tv was the most fun back in the day. Long before twitch and justin.tv even YouTube who now uses the parts of the old on2 encoder.
You can access the starlink.com site from none registered and unsubscribed units. But you need to use the Starlink provided DHCP/DNS servers to do it. Most people use other DNS settings on devices so the walled garden part might not work depending on user device config.
The gnutella.wego.com guys ran servers called mrclean on the gnutella network and ran most of the main nodes for the network passing the torch later to limewire who ran nodes and also cleaned network spam.
Never forget waste and Gnutella. Justin Frankel told Shawn Fanning Napster would get shutdown back when it had 50 users. Gnutella was made not to use a central server that could be shutdown.
Europe doesn't get quite the train length that you see in the US. Also automatic latching versus manual latching on train cars in the US. The US was first to bump latch cars smacking them into one another.