I believe I used the same thing in college (also 2005); something that let you share and download files from other people's Itunes libraries. I was blown away by it the first time I used it; totally seamless.

Thank the lord that Slsk is still running. There is simply soo much material out there Spotify and the like will never have because they were unofficial live bootlegs, weird studio outtakes and obscure EPs and singles.

Case in point: anybody ever listened to "Towering over the Rest?" It's a 20+ track compilation of Radiohead's B-sides and live cuts from 1993-2000. Never officially released, since the tracks were always available inside of individual singles, EPs and 7"s. Listening to it gave me a completely different perspective on the band's output, which I mostly knew through full albums.

Discoveries like that now have to happen via Spotify playlists, and even then you couldn't reproduce that entire compilation simply because Spotify wouldn't have the license for some of those releases, which came out 25 years ago and on labels that no longer exist.

Same at my uni. The networks inside each student housing complex were fast, but each complex was only connected to the school through 100 MBit lines, so everyone would add the name of their complex to their username, and you'd avoid downloading from outside your local network unless strictly necessary.

Eventually the school stopped providing internet to the student housing and we got put on the municipal power company open commercial fiber network and got to choose from an array of commercial ISPs; got massive speed upgrades but it removed the community.