Personal Life
Fanning grew up in Harwich, Massachusetts on Cape Cod and graduated from Harwich High School in 1998. During his time in high school and after he graduated, he spent most of his time at his uncle's oceanside Internet firm business called Chess.net, overlooking Nantasket Beach in Hull, Massachusetts. He spent summers with his uncle in Hull, sleeping on his couch, and spent much of his time experimenting and programming computers in his free time, which eventually led to his development of Napster. During his childhood and adolescence, Shawn had lived in tough, blue-collar, urban towns like Rockland, Massachusetts and Brockton, Massachusetts before moving to the more quiet & small oceanside town of Harwich.
After graduation, Shawn attended Northeastern University on scholarship. Shawn quickly learned that he already knew all of the material being taught to him in classes and was even placed in higher classes he was not qualified to be in. Even then, Shawn became frustrated because he had already learned all the material being taught to him by professors and tutors and eventually dropped out of Northeastern in 1999. During this time at Northeastern, Shawn had begun the developmental stages of Napster and word had spread fast at Northeastern of his invention. Shawn dropped out of college to dedicate his full-time to the Napster program.
On June 1, 1999, Shawn released a preliminary beta program of Napster and soon, hundreds of college students at Northeastern were up and trading music furiously. Soon after he uploaded the beta program of Napster, Shawn moved his company from his headquarters in Hull, Massachusetts to a more spacious location in San Mateo, California and hired additional workers to improve on the Napster Program.
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