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.
When you have dial up you quickly realize you need a download manager that can resume downloads
4kb/sec
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.”
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.
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.
I’m so thankful cable internet was the first kind I ever knew, around 1998.
FUCK YOU I’M NOT OLD YOU’RE OLD
…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…
What’s that, some new BBS?
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.
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
*70 yw
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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