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.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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99% of Duke Nukem 1st shareware disk over a 2400 baud modem and a local BBS... and Grandpa called :(
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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.
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.
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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
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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
Not sure about anyone else, but I used a website with eDonkey links (which also worked in the Overnet client)
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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.
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.
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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
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
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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
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.
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Pfft. Try typing in four pages of code out of Byte magazine just to have your mom cruise over with the vacuum cleaner and make it all dissappear
Bah core memory unlocked. Going through code published in books i got from the library, line by line, trying to figure out if I fucked it up or if the book had an error.
Spent DAYS fighting that... and there was an errata in the next issue ...
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This has to be the most millennial specific experience I've ever come across.
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
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The comments in this thread are making me feel even older having grown up on 2400bps modem dialing into BBSs, lol.
Wasn't one of the major advantages of torrents the fact you could interrupt a download without loosing the partial data?
Torrents was that it was decentralised
Kazaa/LimeWire/eDonkey was that it was resumable and could be downloaded from multiple sources
Napster was that you could download from someone else (and search) across all the users connected - you don't have to connect to each server.
Warez sites was that you could use the web. But all the links were broken all the time. Hotline made you run your own servers and you could be a little king of your own kingdom. But you couldn't search.
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It still is
I think the major advantage was pulling from multiple sources instead of just one other asshole on dialup. I think all the way back to Napster and even http download managers at that time could resume downloads if you lost connection
posted around 2018? maybe earlier? surely not recently.
Or did anyone really use dialup in 2009?
Dial-up was still somewhat common to see in rural areas around that time, but I think most people had broadband by the mid 2000s (in the US, at least). Our family got broadband in the suburbs around 2003/2004-ish, and it was pretty new for our area at the time.
It's still "broadband" by those standards. For most people that was dsl and something in the 0.5-5 Mbps range. Like 3g speeds essentially. Average family wasn't even getting 4g speeds at home until late 2000s.