Justin Frankel, kneeling center, and his buddies, from left, Fritz Jünker, Tom Pepper, and Brennan Underwood mug for the camera, New York, July, 1999.
Disabling the System
Justin Frankel's Winamp threw a monkey wrench into the music business. Now he's going mainstream. Will digital music follow?
Red-haired Justin
Frankel, all big-boned and gangly, is cranking out code in warp mode. It's
1995, and the high school sophomore is sprinting through a programming
contest at the University of Northern Arizona. Frankel, 16, is so far
ahead of his nearest competitor that, just for yucks, he decides to write
a little "fork bomb" -- a program that splits itself repeatedly until it
swamps a computer system. He uploads it, and one by one the machines
around him crash. As administrators scramble, he sits in guilty silence,
then finally confesses to a frazzled systems engineer.
Frankel wins anyway.
The following year, the contest administrator warns the students that
foul play will not be tolerated. Looking straight into Frankel's eyes, she
underlines her point. "No disabling the system," she says.
Luckily, in the intervening years Frankel has paid little attention
to that bit of follow-the-leader advice. He decided to do another bit of
creative programming, a piece of software called Winamp, and it has
almost single-handedly disabled a $12 billion-a-year system -- the music
industry. He created his own company around Winamp, and this past summer
he sold the business (and perhaps himself)to America Online. Justin
Frankel, disabler of systems, is currently worth $70 million. He turned 20
last October .
Justin Frankel, kneeling center, and his buddies, from left, Fritz Jünker, Tom Pepper, and Brennan Underwood mug for the camera, New York, July, 1999.
