2000 flashback: Britney strips; 'West Wing' wins

Back on this day 15 years ago, your car was still littered with compact discs, some of which were probably mixes burned from your illegally downloaded Napster library. (The peer-to-peer music download service was already on the way out, thanks to a lawsuit from Metallica filed in April 2000.)

The first iPod, and the ability to build playlists in iTunes were still a little over year away. But even when you got your hands on the iconic white MP3 player, filling it was a laborious process of ripping CDs to your hard drive and transferring them by hand since the iTunes store wouldn't debut for another three years.

But tech writers were already evangelizing about what we would come to call the Cloud.

"You go on a long drive, and your kids don't have to lug their CDs and portable player," wrote USA TODAY tech reporter Jefferson Graham on Sept. 12, 2000. "Instead, they bring along a wireless MP3 device of the future and access all of their music not internally, but directly from the Internet, where the selections are stored in a 'locker' of sorts. Such a future — where most of us store our music online and listen to it via Net-accessible appliances — may be several years away. But it's clear that many believe online music lockers are going to be huge."

Twelve years later when Apple released iTunes 11 with iCloud, we no longer needed to have a song with us to rock out on road trips.

What else went down this week in 2000:

Britney Spears shed what was left of her good-girl image with a striptease number to open the MTV Video Music Awards. Eminem won the Video of the Year award for The Real Slim Shady.

The West Wing won Emmys for best drama series, supporting actor (Richard Schiff) and actress (Allison Janney) route to a record nine awards for a freshman series. Will & Grace was named the best comedy with Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes sweeping the supporting races.

O.J. Simpson tried unsuccessfully to block a TV miniseries about his murder trial; FX plans to debut American Crime Story, its series about the case next year with Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. playing Simpson.

American Psycho, starring Christian Bale as a Wall Street trader with a secret life as a serial killer, debuted on movie screens.