During my first year at Georgia Tech MP3's became huge. You could search for songs in Lycos, though over the course of that year things started disappearing fast. Winamp was growing and we all downloaded it.
Then one day Jeff showed me a cool Winamp plugin by Ryan Geiss called Geiss. I think we may have skipped class that morning watching the patterns as we tried all kinds of songs; we were in a trance. I remember in particular liking Alice in Chain's Down in a Hole for the slow parts that would burst into intensity.
Geiss ended up working for Nullsoft and creating more cool plugins. Then he moved on to Nvidia.
He's got a lot of interesting stuff on his site, including this shirt, these facts, and a paper on renewable energy.