Anyone remember zmodem with resume? Kermit??
Damn, I'm old.
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
Related communities:
Anyone remember zmodem with resume? Kermit??
Damn, I'm old.
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?
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 have gigabit, 2.5 and 5Gbps speeds now. Even 100GB+ games download in less than 15 minutes. Literally nothing takes several hours anymore.
We still are but now we have gigabit service.
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."
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.
Now we use handheld supercomputer/camcorder/communicators.
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.
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
That's why you queue the download before bed and logout in the morning.
Like and subscribe for more obsolete life skills.
One of the first things I ever programmed was a script that would turn the computer on around 1am, mute the audio, resume the download manager, and turn the computer off at 4am. This way I could download porn and cracked games without my parents knowing.
How did the script run if the computer was off?
I figured out how to schedule the machine to boot up at a specific time, then run the script
Only thing I can think of is Wake on LAN, but you would obviously need another PC/controller to control
I remember some PCs had an option in BIOS to turn on at specific time
You can use a pencil to rewind cassettes after the tape got pulled out by the cassette recorder
FUCK YOU I'M NOT OLD YOU'RE OLD
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.
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
I must’ve put so many god damn viruses and backdoors in the family computer. Was generally smart enough not to run files called *.mp3.exe, but I downloaded my fair share of cracked games and keygens.
I used to love old keygens with their pixel art and chiptune music. That was honestly the best time to be on the internet.
99% of Duke Nukem 1st shareware disk over a 2400 baud modem and a local BBS... and Grandpa called :(
4kb/sec
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.
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
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.