How was this possible? It was as if the door to a bank vault had been left open, no guards in sight. For my part – plundering singles by Artful Dodger, by Semisonic – I have a memory of actually looking over my shoulder. 'The thrill,' said one, whose first download was by Smashing Pumpkins, 'even when I listened to the music through my mum's tinny computer speakers.' Another quickly sought to mine Marlena Shaw's backlist and 'couldn't believe it worked'. I asked colleagues of a similar age what they remembered of Napster's arrival. We were wilfully blinkered, probably, on the exact details of this last point. Music was something you bought after protracted debate with friends in the aisles of Our Price, and then, suddenly, songs were accessible from home.

The internet, when it came in our teens, was welcome, exciting and fathomable, but it changed things briskly and sometimes bewilderingly. I was part of the web-straddling generation. It was like that famous shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the prehistoric monkey throws a bone in the air and it turns into a spaceship. Speaking to me on the phone from the US, Winter added: 'There was no ramp up. how much material was suddenly available,' the technology guru John Perry Barlow tells Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, in his new documentary. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive.

I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was 17, and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame ( OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). Some way from San Mateo, in suburban London I had just become one myself. As recounted in Downloaded – a documentary soon to premiere at the SXSW film festival, telling the story of a piece of software that came and went and whipped up a new digital music industry in its slip – Napster had 20 million users at the time. Figures scrawled on a whiteboard told how many people around the world had installed their file-sharing application and were using it to download music from each other's computers.

I n the first weeks of 2000 the founders of Napster were in their office above a bank in San Mateo, California, considering dizzying numbers.

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