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
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.
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.
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.
🎶 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 🎶
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 ...
Did you try TRON? I wonder how many youngsters know the origin of the movie title
Although coincidental and neat, Steven Lisberger based the name on electronic and only learned about the TRaceON command in BASIC later
https://filmschoolrejects.com/27-things-we-learned-from-the-tron-commentary-89ed3c066303/
The first code I laboriously copied from a book was a program called Eliza. It was hilarious. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
It's evolved, it seems...
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.
A lot of them still have the music. They’re not quite the same as the old school ones, but some have some bangers.
This has to be the most millennial specific experience I've ever come across.
99% of Duke Nukem 1st shareware disk over a 2400 baud modem and a local BBS... and Grandpa called :(
It wasn't time to kick ass and chew bubblegum
That's why you queue the download before bed and logout in the morning.
Like and subscribe for more obsolete life skills.
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.
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.
Wasn't one of the major advantages of torrents the fact you could interrupt a download without loosing the partial data?
It still is
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.
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
The comments in this thread are making me feel even older having grown up on 2400bps modem dialing into BBSs, lol.
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