• ButtDrugs@lemmy.zip
      13·
      4 months ago

      I came to the comments hoping someone posted this. Its a classic and many young’ins will never know the pain.

  • TRBoom@lemmy.zip
    37·
    4 months ago

    As a teenager in this era this sort of thing was awful especially when downloading certain ahhhhh videos…

    There was a program I found that really helped called NetAnt.

    You see back then you could download a small file quickly, but for larger files the distant server would throttle your connection so you wouldn’t hog all their bandwidth. Enter NetAnt.

    NetAnt would send several different ‘ants’ to the server and request different parts of the same file. Then it would download it in chunks and create a file when it was done. You could also queue up different urls to pull from, you just had to know the file structure of the websites content and back then that was rarely obscured and was often logical and predictable. This ended being one of my first applications of my C++ classes to solve a problem I had. I made a little program that generated strings of urls based on what I thought the file structure was and then I dumped a thousand file requests into NetAnt to download while I was in school.

    It worked! And I ended up with gigs and gigs of full porn videos from one of the nastiest websites back then by scraping downloads from the sample pages of 30 second clips.

    I don’t think I actually watched much of it, the acquisition was the important part.

    • toofpic@lemmy.world
      19·
      4 months ago

      There was a bunch of download managers like that! I personally used GoZilla, and as many other apps, it would download in multiple pieces, and there were retries (so you wouldn’t lose the progress if you disconnected for a second, or something like that).
      But I did download a pirated version of Ultima Online, to play on a pirate server, through standard Internet Explorer dialog. The file was 314MB, it took a couple days while I was feeding my Internet Provider with time codes and asking my mom not to even think of touching the phone.

    • Björn@swg-empire.de
      11·
      4 months ago

      I had GetRight to do that. The great thing about it was that it could also work with multiple mirrors. So you would download the same file from multiple servers at once.

      • Jesus_666@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        4 months ago

        GetRight was the bomb.

        Then I got fast internet (we’re talking 25 MBit DSL here) and servers stopped being so stingy and download managers slowly became a thing of the past.

        And then, a year or so ago, I had to work on a company VM that would randomly reset the connection to GitHub, from which I needed a rather large file. So I wrote a super cheap download manager and named it GetWrong in honor of the hero of my ISDN days.

    • tetris11@feddit.ukEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      It’s people like you who send all their web queries chunked as millions of different DNS queries to be assembled later, just so they don’t have to sign up for the free airport wifi.

      EDIT: YOU TOOK DOWN CLOUDFLARE, DIDN’T YOU!?

  • tramdan.uk@sh.itjust.works
    33·
    4 months ago

    When you came back in the room it wouldn’t be saying 3 minutes or 52 years. It would be saying ‘are you sure you want to move file xxxxx.xxx’ and it would have been saying that since you left the room.

  • rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works
    22·
    4 months ago

    “I’ll be there in a Microsoft minute.”

    I have no idea when I’ll be there and there’s a good chance I’ll take a nap.

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
    17·
    4 months ago

    The person writing this post also doesn’t sell it.

    This wasn’t just for a download. This was for moving files generally.

    See how it’s an FTP transfer? As far as the system cares, it’s like moving a file from one folder to another. And moving large files was huge back when you had a maximum drive size of 60 gigs in the OS, so you had to partition your large harddrives into like a dozen partitions and had to regularly move huge chunks of data to manage storage.

  • tacosanonymous@mander.xyz
    15·
    4 months ago

    Try downloading peer hosted torrents. If there’s only one person hosting and they stop, your estimated time will creep to 40+ years before it shows it as not downloading.

    Edit: pic for proof

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
      17·
      4 months ago

      I had some media that I really wanted but couldn’t find anywhere (the Latin American Spanish dub of a movie). I could find unseeded torrents though.

      I put the most promising one in my server and waited. Nothing for a month or so, then one day I check in and see it’s at 5%. And it would sporadically continue for 3 more months until it completed.

      As far as I could tell basically just some random person who happened to have this file was a both a casual torrenter and a leech. But unlike most leeches they didn’t bother stopping the seeding of completed files, they just shut down the program altogether when they weren’t downloading.

      So they (with either throttled upload in their client or shitty upload speeds in general) would go on, open their torrent program, download something, and in doing so keep their program up long enough to seed a few MB before their download completed and they turned it off.

      That file went on to be my highest seed ratio by far after lol

  • Ironfacebuster@lemmy.world
    11·
    4 months ago

    This is still relatable today, since most rural areas only offer DSL, Comcast, or 1 bar of 4G (if you’re not using starlink let alone those other satellite ISPs that shall not be named!) AND they decide to throttle you, all that changes is the download dialogue’s title bar being windows 11 themed 😉

    That reminds me of the time I filed a complaint with the FCC a few years over Centurylink’s “fancy” dialup (DSL, we had a 10 Mbps plan but frequented approximately 1 byte/s) and CENTURYLINK sent me a letter with my complaint in it!

    • tauisgod@lemmy.world
      11·
      4 months ago

      GetRight ftw. I just googled it and it’s still a thing.

      Now, burning CDs at 2x speed on windows 98 was a chore. Converting a whole disc with of mp3’s and not breathing on your computer for 40 minutes so it didn’t freeze and ruin an expensive CDR sucked.

    • waggz
      5·
      4 months ago

      that wasn’t even a guarantee in my day. a lot of webservers didn’t support resume.

      • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Is resume just client/server support for byte serving requests? Pretty sure that was around with HTTP/1.1 in the late 90s, but my memory of it was client support in Netscape for downloads wasn’t really there, so most people probably never used it.

        • waggz
          2·
          4 months ago

          idk the technical specifics on it but standards were mostly loosely followed suggestions back then. i still run in to issues today with some downloads not even knowing the total size. i just remember being on dial up and hoping if i let it go all night i wouldn’t have to start anew in the morning.

  • Lemminary@lemmy.world
    10·
    4 months ago

    Good ol’ days when I used to leave the computer on downloading 1 GB of software overnight, and I would pray to the gods in the morning that it hadn’t aborted halfway through.