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When you have dial up you quickly realize you need a download manager that can resume downloads
Maybe I was just unaware, but download managers only came a little down the pike. For a while it was just “Big file? Good luck!”. And there was something exciting about it.
Back in the 80s I ran my own homebrew BBS for a couple years. A second phone line then was only $9 more a month, so I got one for the computer so phone use wouldn’t be an issue. My roomies and I thought we were livin’ the life.
When I was really young, I was blown away the first time i met someone with their own phone line for internet lmao.
I remember you! Has that acne cleared up?
Anyone with dial up Internet trying to pirate knew the dreaded 4 words “UNEXPECTED END OF ARCHIVE”
my brother called this “the download fucked itself.”
FUCK YOU I’M NOT OLD YOU’RE OLD
What’s that, some new BBS?
…my wife made me dump our earthlink hosting account three years ago for a more-modern hosting service; i feel like my greybeard credibility was compromised…
DSL was such a game changer for so many reasons.
Not the least of which was that you could be online while someone was using the phone.
Shortly after, we completely stopped using phones.
We stopped using landlines.
Phones are everywhere. I mean, they’re rarely used to talk to people like a landline would be, but they’re still everywhere.
Now we use handheld supercomputer/camcorder/communicators.
Anyone remember zmodem with resume? Kermit??
Damn, I’m old.
Are people not downloading huge torrents anymore?? How is downloading some large thing overnight a rare occurrence of bygone eras???
My only guess is that kids these days don’t know about pirating and instead stream everything or download apps?
If you interrupt an internet connection on any normal torrent client from the last, like, 20 years, you can always resume when you’re back online. But back in the 90’s most software didn’t fail that gracefully. And the internet connections today just aren’t as flaky as a dialup connection was.
Web browsers still don’t have proper file download resuming capability despite web servers [nearly] all supporting everything needed for it.
God I wish Mozilla wasn’t run my MBAs. Web browsers could have been so good by now.
We still are but now we have gigabit service.
We have gigabit, 2.5 and 5Gbps speeds now. Even 100GB+ games download in less than 15 minutes. Literally nothing takes several hours anymore.
This is why I was much more into mangas than animes as a teenager. Each anime episode took more than an hour to download… I could at least download mangas faster than I could read them.
The summer after my parents divorced I spent many nights in the corner of the now-empty house with one bar of wifi from my friends house with like 10 tabs of anime loading on an old Dell laptop I only made usable by installing Linux mint.
Good times? Idk, memorable tho for sure
4kb/sec
Who was using dial up 15 years ago (2009)? I grew up in a very rural area and even we got broadband by like 2003 or so. I think someone got their math wrong.
Lol Napster shut down in 2002, it’s clearly not a present day tweet.
Napster ran from 1999-2002, meaning the tweet must be between 7-10 years old
Edit: or just be made up and a guess at the time dfferential.
Napster is currently alive as a Spotify competitor just as a notice
No, no it is not, an unrelated company bought the brand and logos at bankruptcy auction and started Napster 2.0, a rebrand of an unrelated music service, which was then bought by Best Buy and became Rhapsody, then THAT was sold to some tech companies and unified branded as Napster again. It has no connection other than branding to the original Napster.
Says no then goes on to explain that it is around and how it got there
There’s ship of Theseus and then there’s Theseus threw out the whole ship, bought a used ship from someone else but it was still called the ship of Theseus because it was, literally, the ship of Theseus, but you still wouldn’t say THE ship of Theseus was still alive and well.
An almost completely unrelated company named Napster is currently alive.
You don’t know how old this post is.
The house I grew up in just got a wired connection (fiber) in 2024. We had 3G by 2009 but the data caps and cost made it not ideal. Couldn’t even get ISDN.
I’m so thankful cable internet was the first kind I ever knew, around 1998.
56k line? We’ve all been there if we’re old enough.
15 years ago?! This tweet must be 10 years old now
Edit: it’s from 2017, that makes more sense https://x.com/AngryManTV/status/906298612786884609
That would put the original post in 2002, 4 years before Twitter was founded, 2 years before Facebook was founded, 1 year before Myspace was founded and 5 years before Tumblr was founded
So a better time all around.
It still doesn’t make much sense. In 2002 people were already using torrent protocol, that allows to download files in chunks. You can download the missing 3% of your file latter. And even before torrent there was a Direct Connect protocol and DC++ client.
Torrents hadn’t really taken off in 2002, it was more Kazaa and eDonkey2000 from my recollection.
Yeah and Limewire/Bearshare/AudioGalexy/Morphus/WinMx
Okay now I’m sad I missed eDonkey, was it really different than Napster, Kazaa and such? Or was it the same old, you download a movie and find out once it was downloaded that 5% percent of the time it was beastiality. Fucking weird times man.
eDonkey wasn’t like napster/kazaa/ and the rest, but it wasn’t quite like torrents either. It was kinda weird tbh, but it was far easier to get and distribute stuff and i was sad when it died.
Was it p2p whole files using a GUI searh or how did you find the content
It was P2P as it used file hashes to look for other clients to share the file so you didn’t need to rely on downloading from specific users directly like napster, but the other features depended on when you used it and what client. Originally, it was centralized and wasn’t that different than its contemporaries in how you used it, but then an improved client was released (eMule) and it added support for a second decentralized network (KAD) and it also used compression and had a bunch of better features like robust bad IP blocking (RIAA was ramping up their bullshit around then) and way to disguise the traffic to prevent ISP snooping/blocking.
Not sure about anyone else, but I used a website with eDonkey links (which also worked in the Overnet client)
I was torrenting in 2001/02. Had this awesome little client with Chinese characters that worked great, but took me a minute to figure out which buttons did what.
Pretty sure I still have the stand-alone file on a USB somewhere.
The whole Napster thing was pretty brief, I only remember it really being around for like 6 months. Then it got shut down and everyone moved to the alternatives that had resume and other features, like eDonkey and Kazaa. I really can’t remember what order they came in though.
This got me looking and unfortunately possibly found a bit of info that debunks the whole tweet. Napster was completely gone by July 2001. So this guy either has the date wrong(by like 15months) or it wasn’t a Napster download. Kazaa would be out by then too probably so that leaves Limewire, but that used torrenting protocols so it wouldn’t have had the same susceptibility to a loss of connection.
It was likely BearShare, but they were embarrassed to admit it.
Napster also let you resume unfinished downloads anyway.
Thank God we got down to the truth of the tweet. I was really worried.
You know you don’t have to be a jackass to people right?
You know you don’t have to be anal over things that don’t matter right?
What other memes have you “debunked” recently? That seems like a great use of your time and energy.
I’m sorry curiosity has left your life entirely. Also fuck you.
🎶 Once in awhile, maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites
Like Morpheus, or Grokster, or LimeWire, or Kazaa
But deep in your heart, you know the guilt would drive you mad
And the shame would leave a permanent scar
’Cause you start out stealing songs, then you’re robbing liquor stores
And selling crack and running over school kids with your car 🎶
Remember ‘allofmp3’ aka ‘alltunes’ ?
I think AllofMP3 had the best business model - price varied based on how high quality you wanted, and they offered soooo many formats. With no DRM, of course.
Is it really the customers’ problem if the USA and Russian copyright organizations didn’t communicate very well?
It was there a bit closer to two years. Kazaa and edonkey kicked off after Napster got in trouble.
BitTorrent wasn’t even launched until AFTER Napster was shutdown.
The mention of Napster would have put the original download this tweet refers to as happening sometime before July 2001. But, it’s entirely possible they were using Napster as a generic term for any number of the other protocols around in 2002, most of which didn’t have the ability to resume. BitTorrent would have been the anomaly here for its resumabilty, but was rarely used for music privacy at the time. PirateBay and Demonoid launching later in 2003.
Sure, and all 5 people who were using torrents in 2002 were having a grand old time with them, too, I’m sure.
While yes it existed, it was not very widely used. I think I downloaded my first torrent in 2005 or 2006ish. That was about when the clients got much more popular. Still took forever to download shit though.
The way I discovered Team Fortress, the original mod for Quake, was because I just happened to join a server running TF and had to spend all day downloading the files from the server on a 28.8k modem so I could play on it, and when I finally got to play, I was greeted with a super racist map called Cross the Border where one team had to reach a goal point on the other side of a giant wall, another team was trying to stop them, and a 3rd team that could only spawn as snipers in two small towers on the wall whose goal I don’t even remember.
I was extremely confused but God damn was it fun.
Rascism aside that sounds like a fun game mode to play.
Just call it invasion and make it generic.
Really what made it racist were the team names:
Immigrants vs Border Patrol vs CIA
This is basically what happened to Poland.
Me, playing Age of Empires, blissfully unaware that some shmuck with DSL completely obliterated my settlement 45 seconds ago and my dialup connection just hasn’t caught up yet.
my fav was bouncing people from the system (bbs) using the call-waiting blip during text-based mud PVP fights… and if you really pissed someone off they would just physically cut your phone line.
You fight dirty
I remember dropping Koreans from Diablo 2 by filling the text box with periods. I may have watched some friends ruin some hard-core players days in pvp.
I am exactly “I miss MUDding” years old
I was the main builder for one called Lost Prophecy. I was obsessed. I easily wrote a few novels of words for descriptions of rooms, items, mobs, and their stats and programming.
I asked the guy who ran it after it was totally dead many years ago if we could release all my work publicly for other people to enjoy on still-active MUDs. He said no. Makes me sad to this day.
That is sad, but unsurprising. MUD owners were a special breed of cat. I really enjoyed Avatar, the admin there was legendarily unapproachable.
Special breed of cat indeed. Admins were generally awful. I never even got so much as a thanks for all the work I put in.
Not that I’m not weird as fuck for spending incredible amounts of time in my early teens doing all that on a tiny MUD. When MUDs had already become a niche interest.
Discworld MUD still is pretty active the last I logged in, probably three or four years ago.
Technically also, https://www.sdf.org/
Oh man, I forgot about MUDs until reading your post. What a throwback to a simpler time. I was hooked on one that sounded like a spider - Arachnea or something.
Probably Achaea, that’s an Iron Realms game, good choice. I haven’t played a lot of MUDs but Iron Realms made the better ones that I have played. I liked Starmourn quite a lot but it seems not many other people did because it’s gone legacy mode now.
Achaea is still up and running if you want to go log in again.
