1mo ago

The pain was real

175 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.

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.
  
  Discworld MUD still is pretty active the last I logged in, probably three or four years ago.
  
  https://www.mudconnect.com
  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.

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

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
- 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...
  
  That's wild. I wonder if it's true the claim that ELIZA performed better on a turning test than GPT 3.5?
- I recall doing this with lines of 16 byte hex numbers trying to be so careful to not miss any lines or get them in the wrong order.
  Sometimes it would work great, but mainly not.

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.
  
  Jason Scott did a talk at defcon a while back specifically about warez pages in old video games. That scene was wild from the beginning.

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?
- You can use a pencil to rewind cassettes after the tape got pulled out by the cassette recorder
- Photo says it happened after 17hrs
  
  As long as you sleep 20 hrs a day the tip stands!

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
  
  Shake it, grandpa...
- *70 yw

This has to be the most millennial specific experience I've ever come across.

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.
  
  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.

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.

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.
  
  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)

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
- earthlink.net?
  
  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...

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.
  
  Newsgroups had direct downloads and files broken down into small multi part rar, with parity checks to make sure nothing ea corrupted.
  IRC/XDCC had bots that you requested files from, and if they didn't have it they would sometimes find it for you and notify you when it became available.
  
  Hell yeah. I loved Hotline.
  Retroshare is a modern equivalent, but there are no trackers, so you have to have some other way to find servers.
- 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone remember zmodem with resume? Kermit??
Damn, I'm old.

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

Is this an old tweet? Like dialup was still used but not nearly as common only 15 years ago
- It's more like 30 years this point.
  
  🥲

Press resume after she finishes?
- You know that bastard is already corrupted. When the connection is cut off dirty like that, there is no salvaging it.
  
  Didn't Napster have chunk checksums similar to BitTorrent? I think at least emule did.
- Original Napster didn't support resume, so if it failed you started again. Later Napster-likes supported resuming files.
  
  I don’t think people nowadays can comprehend how basic the OG Napster was. You searched for a file and every single person with a matching file would come up as a separate result. When you downloaded you downloaded only from that one person and if they cancelled it or whatever before it finished then it was gone and you had to start again. You couldn’t resume, not even from the same person with the exact same file.
  
  Memory fails me, but I want to say that the idea of a re-download finding the end of file and resuming went back even further in history (Zmodem I think was my first exposure to it). The creation of such a miracle was game changing for the very reason OP mentions, along with other interruptions.

but napster was p2p, wasn't? the download could be completed later on

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

4kb/sec

Wait, you didn't have to manually unplug the modem and plug in the telephone to use it?
- Most if not all modems have an in and out port on the back so you can plug a phone through it. But most likely in this situation, the house has a split in the phone line so that you could have multiple phones in different rooms.
  So the op was in the office with the computer and the mom was in the kitchen trying to call someone else.

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.

“Moms”?
- Noun moms (plural moms)
  (African-American Vernacular) Affectionate term of address for one's mother.
  
  I always thought of it as a possessive noun, not plural.
  But honestly i don't know if i just made possessive noun up or not.
- African-American Vernacular English (basically Black dialect) for 'mom'. Might be dated by now?
  
  black dialect, not slang
  
  Nah, not dated, so many people still say moms.
- Had to delete my comment because I assumed that it was a typo, but it is possible that they had two mothers who both picked up the phone at the same time
  
  lol. This is adorable
  How wud two people pick up a phone tho?

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
  
  Napster is currently alive as a Spotify competitor just as a notice
- 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.