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.
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
It was P2P as it used file hashes to look for other clients to share the file so you didn’t need to rely on downloading from specific users directly like napster, but the other features depended on when you used it and what client. Originally, it was centralized and wasn’t that different than its contemporaries in how you used it, but then an improved client was released (eMule) and it added support for a second decentralized network (KAD) and it also used compression and had a bunch of better features like robust bad IP blocking (RIAA was ramping up their bullshit around then) and way to disguise the traffic to prevent ISP snooping/blocking.
Not sure about anyone else, but I used a website with eDonkey links (which also worked in the Overnet client)
Yeah and Limewire/Bearshare/AudioGalexy/Morphus/WinMx
I was torrenting in 2001/02. Had this awesome little client with Chinese characters that worked great, but took me a minute to figure out which buttons did what.
Pretty sure I still have the stand-alone file on a USB somewhere.
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.
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.
That is sad, but unsurprising. MUD owners were a special breed of cat. I really enjoyed Avatar, the admin there was legendarily unapproachable.
Special breed of cat indeed. Admins were generally awful. I never even got so much as a thanks for all the work I put in.
Not that I’m not weird as fuck for spending incredible amounts of time in my early teens doing all that on a tiny MUD. When MUDs had already become a niche interest.
Technically also, https://www.sdf.org
Discworld MUD still is pretty active the last I logged in, probably three or four years ago.
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.
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.
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
Although coincidental and neat, Steven Lisberger based the name on
electronicand only learned about the TRaceON command in BASIC laterhttps://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…
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.
I didnt even know keygens still existed, i thought everything just had a cracked executable these days. Im trying to think of the last one i saw, probably like 12 years ago, but it was more professional looking than most legitimate programs, with really amazing graphic design and music and a really well made ui. It wasnt just a keygen, there were other options, but i cant remember what else it did or what game it was for.
It’s mostly software that still has key gens
Also some cracks come with a lil keygen like thing that cracks the game right then and there. Those will sometimes have them too.
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?
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
Photo says it happened after 17hrs
As long as you sleep 20 hrs a day the tip stands!
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
Shake it, grandpa…
*70 yw
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?
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.
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
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
