On the Net, however, “_Arbeit Macht Frei_” would find its audience. A man from Turkey asked for a full demo tape—unavailable—and more songs. Other Netfolks wrote in from Texas, Florida, and elsewhere in the States, some of whom said more or less: “You know, wow, I’m a Zappa fan and I can hear the influence. It’s pretty cool.” The Net, in character, was blurring distinctions between artists and fans and helping the two groups mix. “We realized we had something,” Patterson told me. “Like, ‘Jeez, we got these responses to a band that had never played anywhere and didn’t have a tape out.’ So we started grabbing a couple of our friends’ bands—like my roommate’s. And we put Rob’s roommate’s band up there, and we just kind of kept grabbing bands to put up. And slowly everyone was getting one or two responses to what they had posted. And we needed a place to actually keep all this music. There were like four bands maybe at that time.” Patterson, however, quickly filled up all the disk space available to him at his commercial Internet provider, Netcom; so he and Lord contacted their university and asked if they could store the music there. “Well, it turned out that the guy who was in charge of running the FTP site was a musician—he was in four bands—and he said, ‘Sure, go for it.’ And we put his four bands up there.” The technology would have seemed infuriatingly hard to the world at large. You couldn’t just hook into the World Wide Web, point and click your way to the IUMA archives, and choose the song you wanted; no, you had to do FTP, short for File Transfer Protocol, threading your way through the big hard drives at Santa Cruz, until you reached the subdirectory with the music. And then, with most software, you had to type out the file names. Patterson and Lord didn’t even start out with postings on Gopher (which, to be grossly simplistic, is a more primitive version of the Web). Even back then, however, the two were thinking about the Net equivalent of album covers or of the J cards that record companies used to tout cassettes. In other words they didn’t just post files of sound alone. They also pondered the use of files with pictures that music fans could download. “At this point,” Patterson said, “it was still just a fun project. We didn’t think about making it a money-making venture at that point. We were just like, you know, ‘Let’s put bands up and see what we can do to mess with the record industry.’ We had this attitude like, ‘We’ll cut out waste in the industry.’ At that time there was, like, no press about us, so we weren’t really vocal, but we had those attitudes. We were kind of like naive and rebellious.”