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.
Downloading RPG maker assets for a total of 28 hours on a 56k modem using Gozilla so i could pause the download each day during peak hours and only download off peak for a penny a minute only to make the first 20 minutes of a terrible and sonewhat unoroginal RPG game, and never use it again, is a core memory for me.
I think my friend showed me how to use switches and variables at his house on his copy and i got very excited i could create a condition to be met to allow a boulder to be move. I just had to try to make something.
I think i ended up just making a game where you load in at max level and speak to someone to start a fight with the strongest monsters just to play the battle and use all the top level spells. And then just mever played again
I remember that Kazaa would BSoD my computer if it was on for a while and somebody would use the computer. I was downloading Ghost in the Shell for half a day and then my sibling used the computer and it crashed. Got so fucking mad. I had to lock the computer everytime I wanted to download a movie. Later I learned that one of the memory modules was busted. Couldn’t do shit about it since the warranty was expired and I was a dead broke teenager who didn’t want to work. Back then bad RAM was way more common than it is today. For almost every new PC I got back then I had to RMA a module.
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.
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.
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
An almost completely unrelated company named Napster is currently alive.
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.
One of the reasons MP3 took off so well was that “CD Quality” was roughly 1MB a minute of audio, a single song would download in 10-20 minutes not hours. I remember every night before bed i’d dial up, and in the morning before school i’d burn a new CD to listen to on the bus ride.
I remember getting an mp3 cd player, whoch was revolutionary because suddenly the disc capacity was based on file size, not music runtime. You didnt have to burn whole cds as an album, you could fit a whole 700mb of songs and directories on one cd. It even had a little digital display that would show the filenames and directory tree, so you could have your music all organized just as you would on the computer. Total gamechanger. Then ipods came around a few years later and changed everything again.
The frustrating thing was most of the mp3 players had less storage than a damn CD at first, so I just kept chugging along with that thing for quite a while. Honestly 700mb of mp3s was a pretty damn good amount.
Except I feel like I remember needing to burn 2 CDs instead: one for the computer or if you were cool and had a car stereo that would play mp3s and one (or maybe several) to put in the walkman or the boom box or whatever.
Huge binders of sharpie covered CDs… Good times.
Then the DVD burner came out and started a black market scene at school, but that’s another topic entirely.
The comments in this thread are making me feel even older having grown up on 2400bps modem dialing into BBSs, lol.
Fellow dinosaur here. Member legend of the red dragon? I member
Exitilus ftw.
I lived through that, I don’t know why it took 17 hours. It’d take half an hour on a bad day for an MP3 song and there wasn’t really anything else on Napster. I’ve never heard of anyone having audiobooks on there or anything, and it didn’t do movies.
Beethoven’s fifth symphony FLAC
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
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.
This is basically what happened to Poland.
Really what made it racist were the team names:
Immigrants vs Border Patrol vs CIA
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.
This has to be the most millennial specific experience I’ve ever come across.
Anyone remember zmodem with resume? Kermit??
Damn, I’m old.
This tweet was from yesterday at 8:50pm.
I ended up just abusing my schools T1 and CD burners. All for anime music videos. Like, 90% of it was dragon ball z and Linkin park mashups. My schools IT department hated me.
My schools IT department hated me.
But in the end, it doesn’t even matter.
AMVs are a lost art
I made an AMV over half my life ago. A few of them actually. Got over 250k views on my most popular one, 30k on others. YouTube even offered me partner which I didn’t accept because I sure as fuck didn’t own the rights to the media I used.
The channel and videos no longer exist, but these were the AMVs:
The 250k: Fullmetal Alchemist, Ed vs. Mustang (Move - Thousand Foot Krutch)
Naruto, Haku and Zabuza (Daughtry - It’s Not Over)
Naruto, Sasuke vs. Orochimaru (Korn - Right Now)
s-CRY-ed (Korn - Evolution)
Not lost at all. There’s anime cons all over the world hosting yearly AMV competitions and that stuff blows Linkin Park DBZ clipshows out of the water. Sadly the internet at large isn’t as obsessed with them as 15 years ago. I just looked at a playlist of competition entries and they were all sub-1k views on Youtube. More people must have seen them at the various cons.
56k line? We’ve all been there if we’re old enough.
