The torrent technology wasn't easy to master, a good ratio was difficult to maintain, the forum moderators were Nazis, and uploading even a single byte of data to the site technically constituted a felony-level conspiracy.
The ancient race of vinyl enthusiasts who had once haunted record stores and swap meets was dying out, superseded by a mutant breed of torrent obsessives.
They have already leaked several unreleased Sony blockbusters to torrent sites.
Or imagine if they were Roberto Benigni, and they started clambering around on their furniture like Mammy Two Shoes from Tom and Jerry and then bellowed out a torrent of obviously too enthusiastic "I want to kiss everybody!
The NFL has endured a torrent of criticism for its handling of the incident both in recent days and earlier in the year, when it handed Rice a two-game suspension that was widely viewed as far too lenient.
An hour before the kick-off I was signing autographs for some young fans in the tunnel when a torrent of the worst kind of language imaginable was hurled at me from above with no regard for the children present.
A torrent tracker was perfect in this regard: it used an SQL database to sort the torrents, and PHP to present them to users.
Matt Mason is the chief content officer at BitTorrent, and the driving force behind the company's "Bundles" initiative, which gets musicians, filmmakers, authors and other creators to release their work packaged up as torrent files, with fans unlocking the full contents usually by entering their email address.
"It is looking exceptional this year," says William Pitts, as the torrent of golden wheat ears sweeps into the flashing blades below the cab of his combine harvester.
On his mark, Emily Maitlis began Minority Reporting like billy-o through a torrent of impenetrable statistics, while John Curtice of the British Polling Council gradually unravelled to such an extent that you ended up worrying how he'd look whenever the camera returned to him.
For Sinéad O'Connor, the best way to dismantle male dominance was not to go after any actual men in the industry but to rev up that noted vehicle of genuine concern, the open letter, and use it to deliver a torrent of slut-shaming that was so feminist that it repeatedly used the term "prostitute" as a derogatory insult.
