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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
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 am exactly “I miss MUDding” years old
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.
When you have dial up you quickly realize you need a download manager that can resume downloads
This has to be the most millennial specific experience I’ve ever come across.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Wasn’t one of the major advantages of torrents the fact you could interrupt a download without loosing the partial data?
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.
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.
Is this an old tweet? Like dialup was still used but not nearly as common only 15 years ago
Press resume after she finishes?
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.
Anyone remember zmodem with resume? Kermit??
Damn, I’m old.
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
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.
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.
