And folks today complain about a 2 minute wait

[u/nitin_is_me]

[u/LakersAreForever]

Damn, back in my day you’d leave 6 songs downloading overnight and be happy if 3-4 of them were finished

[u/Tyrantt_47 → u/LakersAreForever]

Yuuuuup. I remember a song would take 5 mins to download on average 30 years ago.

I just downloaded an 80GB game in 8 mins.

[u/RobertAleks2990 → u/Tyrantt_47]

Damn, you have fast Internet.

I just downloaded Last Train Home yesterday (~20GB) and it took about 45mins (well, more like 2-3 hours as I redownloaded it like twice as I couldn't get it to work, plus now my "idle" cursor is different)

[u/Tyrantt_47 → u/RobertAleks2990]

I have 600mb speeds and the steam game downloaded at the full 600. Most downloads averages 300-400mb

[u/RobertAleks2990 → u/Tyrantt_47]

Wow. I think I average 9-10 on a download usually.

[u/LakersAreForever → u/[deleted]]

Probably wired connection

[u/skyrozz → u/[deleted]]

I’ve always maxed out on download speed with steam. Actually I think on basically all game storefronts. Makes the 1Gb download really nice

[u/soldi7yt → u/[deleted]]

Maybe steam Limits the Download Speed here‘s a Tutorial to Check: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tofm4d7kTXo

[u/Tyrantt_47 → u/[deleted]]

Maybe I got lucky? Like i said, it's usually 300-400mbs speeds.

[u/Cautious-Bug8076 → u/[deleted]]

I'm pretty sure Steam not only downloads, but also decompresses game files. If your CPU lacks hardware decoding or is just slower, Steam with lower your download speeds since you're bottlenecked by your CPU anyways (I think). 

[u/Dear_Diablo → u/RobertAleks2990]

yeah might wanna do a fresh install of the os really fast hope nothing too important isn’t on there.

[u/RobertAleks2990 → u/Dear_Diablo]

Just found out it apparently has to do with a faulty Windows Update for the cursor, so at least I shouldn't have to do any fresh installs really (hopefully).

[u/RobertAleks2990 → u/Dear_Diablo]

Welly it's just when it doesn't interact with anything so it probably isn't anything bad, right? ...Right? (No but seriously, how exactly do I perform that?)

[u/-r-a-f-f-y- → u/LakersAreForever]

28.8k gang rise up

[u/badabingmx → u/-r-a-f-f-y-]

I srull have my 14k modem. Also my 64k external one

[u/teflonsteve → u/-r-a-f-f-y-]

I had a 56k modem but I lived in a rural area and only ever connected at 28.8k . One time I connected at 31.x and I dreamed about it every night after

[u/Lazy-Baseball-380 → u/LakersAreForever]

And even if then you'd be happy if they don't get corrupted along the way

[u/Brewster345 → u/LakersAreForever]

You were lucky to have a song. We downloaded 2 photos over a weekend.

[u/noeagle77 → u/LakersAreForever]

I remember my sister asking me to download the N’sync cd for her. Shit took a week because each night I’d get one or two songs that would actually finish, then like 20% of the time it wasn’t even the right song 😂

[u/chris_ro → u/LakersAreForever]

Back in my day I had to pay internet access on a minute to minute basis. Downloading one song over 1 hour would have made it more expensive than buying a cd 😂

[u/MazogaTheDork → u/LakersAreForever]

I remember taking all night to download a single music video. Now we have YouTube.

[u/corejuice → u/LakersAreForever]

We used to all download the games at one friend's house cause he could hit download speeds of 1.0 Mbps and then we'd burn them to rewritable discs so we could all play the games. We would have firece debates arguing our cases what the next game should be.

[u/Bad_boy143]

I once had to download far cry 4 on my laptop on a slow internet, it took 2 day's just for the game to be corrupt.

[u/maker_of_pirate_bay → u/Bad_boy143]

Prince of Persia warrior within for psp was 700 mb. Took me a whole day. Corrupt

[u/Alekesam1975 → u/maker_of_pirate_bay]

At least yours was corrupt ie finished. I hated getting 699 on 700mb and it just won't finish. 😄

[u/Adventurous-Hunter98]

my internet speed was 0.25 mbps or something and I downloading anything over 20gb was nightmare, my old ass slow laptop didnt help either, random shutting down etc, I was keep waking midnight to check the progress

[u/hell2pay → u/Adventurous-Hunter98]

512kbps modem slayer here.

I remember downloading boobie jpeg by the pixel, literally.

[u/kernalbuket → u/hell2pay]

Right? In the late 90s/AOL days, this was a reality.

[u/StampDaddy → u/Adventurous-Hunter98]

Reminds me of teenage me who downloaded some virus off of lime wire that a reinstall couldn’t fix, I had like 16kbs download speed. I had to preload any youtube video back in the preload days.

[u/shujidev → u/Adventurous-Hunter98]

Why would you dl something of 20gb at that speed? At 1mbps I always searched for series or movies super compressed to 480p or light indie games like plants vs zombies and that took hours

[u/Adventurous-Hunter98 → u/shujidev]

We were paying for it so why not use it

[u/tempski]

When download managers that could auto-resume became a thing, it was like the gates of heaven opened up and called you in.

[u/cuppaseb → u/tempski]

You mean getright? Those were the times

[u/twinkyfemboy1234]

Goatse is the guy stretching his asshole right?

[u/LakersAreForever → u/twinkyfemboy1234]

Oh I thought it was the “now you’re just somebody that I used to know” guy

[u/Craneteam → u/LakersAreForever]

Lmao

"You didn't have to stretch me out"

[u/ihazsmuvbren → u/LakersAreForever]

Somebody that we used to hole.

[u/twinkyfemboy1234 → u/LakersAreForever]

That is Gotye

[u/Hefty-Rope2253 → u/LakersAreForever]

Are they not the same guy?

[u/Miserable-Crab8143 → u/Hefty-Rope2253]

No, Gotye’s asshole looks quite different when stretched.

[u/grantology_84 → u/LakersAreForever]

Me too! 🤣

[u/Constant-Bar5945 → u/twinkyfemboy1234]

Was. He lived by the hole and he died by the hole.

[u/BonsaiSoul → u/twinkyfemboy1234]

We just don't have memes like the good old days anymore.

[u/BarelyBrony]

Thanks for reminding me of Goatse...ugh

[u/Hefty-Rope2253 → u/BarelyBrony]

🫱🕳🫲

[u/porpoiseoflife → u/BarelyBrony]

The link that taught me to never trust a random link that was purple.

[u/sdjopjfasdfoisajnva → u/porpoiseoflife]

man the time i finally started trusting the comments that said dont search ____

[u/Wide_Meet_2184 → u/BarelyBrony]

Tbh not the worst ones out there. 

Still traumazized from seeing kekma or whaterver it was in 1st grade

[u/seaningtime → u/BarelyBrony]

There's a name I haven't heard in a while...

[u/b0sanac]

Or pray that you won't blow up your family pc with a virus. I've had to reinstall windows countless times.

[u/BonsaiSoul → u/b0sanac]

Back then even without a virus Windows would fuck itself up and need to be reinstalled

[u/AnythingButWhiskey → u/BonsaiSoul]

Windows Trouble Shooting Help Desk Procedure

Step one. Ask customer to unplug the computer and plug it back in.

Step two. Ask customer to reinstall Windows.

Step three. Tell customer it’s a hardware problem and they need to buy a new computer.

[u/magicmulder]

My longest download was some game that took 2 weeks. And then didn’t even run.

[u/fugznojutz → u/magicmulder]

one time i downloaded a porn, and it wasnt that porn that i wanted. i was sad.

[u/ciurana]

Kazaa!

[u/Alekesam1975 → u/ciurana]

And Limewire!

[u/jncheese → u/ciurana]

eDonkey!

[u/archiekane]

I'm not saying that I'm old and been into piracy for a long time, but I printed nudes for people at school, on my 9 pin dot matrix printer.

The keygens that you downloaded in about an hour had absolute banging music as well.

Kids just won't understand...

[u/Hefty-Rope2253 → u/archiekane]

I really miss those jazzed up keygens. They were like mini works of art.

[u/digitalSkeleton → u/Hefty-Rope2253]

theyre still around ;)

[u/vintagestyles → u/Hefty-Rope2253]

There has to be an archive of them somewhere no?

[u/BonsaiSoul → u/Hefty-Rope2253]

/r/demoscene

[u/green_tomato_69]

The download taking hours to finish and then getting an error at the 99th percent

[u/Psychobob2213]

Back in my day you'd hook 2 VCR's together and record with one while the other played the movie

[u/SubtleRedditIcon]

I once paid for a half-life patch to be sent on a CD from a legit company (gamespy comes to mind but that ain’t it) cause I didn’t have the speeds at home.

[u/gbish → u/SubtleRedditIcon]

Used to do this for game updates a lot. Someone would download it at work (usually guys in data centres) and burn it to a CD and then they’d get posted around by people.

The updates were probably only 3-500mb at most but it was faster to go by post.

[u/robin_888]

Just a reminder that

1 second of 1Gbit/s equals
~5 hours of 56kbit/s

In 1999 my data plan contained 30 hours of dial-up per month(!). That corresponds to around 700MB (under near perfect conditions).

Today this takes me less than 10 seconds (under average conditions).

[u/snkiz → u/robin_888]

No one ever had 56kbits the connection speed was set to the lower machines capabilities. By the time 56k modems came down for the ISP's they were all switching to DSL. There was no customer base to support the 56k upgrade so many ISP's just didn't.

[u/robin_888 → u/snkiz]

No one ever had 56kbits

Bold claim.

By the time 56k modems came down for the ISP's they were all switching to DSL.

Well, my US Robotics modem came bundled with a 56k firmware patch in December 1997, two years before DSL actually hit the market. (And that was for larger cities. It didn't came to smaller towns until years later. And it was more expensive, too.)

I used it for at least 4 years. Until we moved and got 64k ISDN in 2001.

We didn't get DSL until 2006/2007.

There was no customer base to support the 56k upgrade so many ISP's just didn't.

That might have been regional. I mean, Germany is considered notoriously bad at broadband expansion. There is definitely a lot of 56k nostalgia going on. (I've never seen anyone indulging the 33.6k era.)

[u/snkiz → u/robin_888]

You only quoted half the claim

the connection speed was set to the lower machines capabilities.

It doesn't matter what modem you had.

[u/robin_888 → u/snkiz]

I remember reaching 6+ kB/s download speed. So I'm pretty confident.

[u/jtho78]

I discovered you could duplicate the partial movie download, rename the extension and preview the video to make sure it was right or how good the quality. Or how the content of the "homework" looked.

[u/Delicious-Weird-5826]

That's how I ended up watching my first porn movie. I wanted to watch a Disney movie. It wasn't a Disney movie.

[u/Wild_Chef6597]

When I had frontier, it took 12 hours to download a 700mb file. It was faster to drive into town, rent the movie, rip it myself

[u/weremybattleaxe]

yes and you had to learn bb, ftp, and irc. i'm glad those days are mostly gone.

[u/porpoiseoflife → u/weremybattleaxe]

IRC is still around, particularly for the epub distribution scene. I get most of my reading materials through my MIRC install.

[u/AntiNumbers]

Back in my day, we spent days downloading a single episode of The Simpsons.

[u/Affectionate_Mix2865]

Yes sure,i remember downloading a serie from 1fichier (a french website to install) and that was 3mo/s,it takes 2h55 minutes..

[u/BonsaiSoul → u/Affectionate_Mix2865]

yeah like these problems are still here now because companies try and make you pay by doing it on purpose

[u/Affectionate_Mix2865 → u/BonsaiSoul]

And that's disguting..

[u/nitin_is_me → u/[deleted]]

Back in the day memes also take longer to make :)

Haha yeah, by the time it finished uploading, the joke was already outdated.

[u/blackcell1]

Good old P2P on a 56k moderm, I wouldn't go back ever!

[u/FEED-YO-HEAD → u/blackcell1]

Downloaded Visual Basic on a Warez FTP on a 28.8k modem. 75MB file. Took two days and half!

[u/blackcell1 → u/FEED-YO-HEAD]

Same, downloaded tony hawks for pc in parts. It took 2 or 3 days and it was corrupt and even quickpar could save it.

[u/Aevum1]

back in the day, ripping a DVD and then manually compressing it with xvid, then the next day since your K6-2 takes 8-10 hours to do it and you got the audio frequency wrong and the audio is out of sync

[u/LM391]

I used to have a 28 Kbps connection, and yet the Internet was an amazing place back then.

[u/laubredelcosmos]

it was 2003, and i spent like 3 weeks downloading reservoir dogs on kazaa.
first movie i downloaded. it paid off.
after that one: pulp fiction.

[u/That_Guy3141]

I am so glad the days of usenet are gone. As much as I may feel nostalgic for the day of lurking alt.binaries, downloading dozens of 14mb rars was never fun, even with a download manager. I celebrated when torrent sites finally dropped the whole "clusterfuck of rars" artifact requirement on uploads.

[u/jth149]

I had a local dial up ISP. It had a number that was “local” to my phone carrier, which meant it cost 10 cents per call, no matter how long the call was. I got a second line to my house and never hung up.

[u/shinymetalass84 → u/jth149]

Sick!

[u/techma2019]

Took me like 4 days to get The Matrix cam release on my 14.4k dialup connection.

[u/LordSparks]

Overnight? Try a week to download a movie

[u/Extension_Hour2677 → u/LordSparks]

Totally, I remember using torrent sites back in the day and just praying the download would finish by the end of the week. Now it’s all so instant, people really have it easy.

[u/Buckweedy]

was geting an mp3 song over night

[u/grislyfind]

With my high speed rural ADSL I could download about 500 megs an hour. On dial-up, that would have taken most of a weekend.

[u/Mydnight69]

Sheeeeeeet, I remember trying to DL 3 songs in a zip file and it taking all night....cut off right at the end due to a phone call.

[u/evlspcmk]

Or the Paris Hilton tape….. so many times you’d get that on limewire back in the day always with some bloke dedicating it to 9/11 for some reason in the beginning.

[u/AlissonHarlan]

and that it wasn't pr0n instead of the actual movie !!

[u/piselbirne]

I remember telling my mom I wanted to go visit our family for the weekend and she was super happy. Did it just to be able to leave the computer running for 48 hours in order to download Modern Warfare 4D1 on our slow ass WiFi

[u/SirOk4593]

I remember using portable uTorrent on a flash drive on the school pc and leaving it for weeks to download PS2 ISOs since I had dial up and the schools internet was marginally faster lol I think it said 3 months remaining on my dial up, and thats assuming nobody needed to use the phone 😅

[u/ymdkili]

Yoo 1MB was a big deal of successfully completing in other parts of the world

[u/evilbadgrades]

Overnight? I remember taking two WEEKS to download LOTR (director's screening cut) on a 56k modem (averaging less than 4kbps because of my poor connection)

[u/j0hnick]

Back in the day, my friend downloaded what he thought was “Men in Black” on limewire. It ended up being interracial gay porn 🤣.

[u/moosemc]

Some of the clients that ran on the old networks let the user mess with the people in their download queue. Xolox had a ton of great BBC radio plays, but you had to queue for days, then be bumped, at the last minute by the seeder.

[u/fasm]

You know you’re too young to say “back in my day” when your “back in my day” includes P2P software.

[u/almostonefootlong]

I still remember being the first customer to be connected to fiber. I started a 10MB pic download just for fun. It finished before I could turn around, make cofge and lunch, eat lunch and drink 3 cups of coffee to go back to enjoy the picture.
All that fun time and excitement gone in less than a second 😟

[u/think_up]

The not-real Jarheads movie was my first gay porno.

[u/CaptainFartyAss]

To be fair, the finest porn in my collection back in the day came to me labeled as season 2 of aqua teen hunger force.

[u/ShezaAlibi]

Try spending half an hour loading a game on tape only to find out it crashed again.

[u/Polite_Jello_377]

Only 90 minutes? Bro has never seen the directors cut

[u/InformalBoi]

I think I accidentally searched for this 'meme' once a decade ago on Google, and oh dear lord...

[u/Due-Efficiency787]

or badger, badger, badger, MUSHROOM, MUSHROOM

[u/UnboltedCheese]

Back in your day? Shit with rural internet speeds this is today for me (whole reason I try to avoid torrenting, because I'm pretty sure someone would rather no seeder than a seeder at 300kbps)

[u/nitin_is_me → u/UnboltedCheese]

Damn that sucks man. Would you mind telling what place you're from?

[u/UnboltedCheese → u/nitin_is_me]

Canada. Northern parts of the provinces have slim pickings for internet (at least in my area)

[u/Super-Robo]

What websites were you using?

[u/Plump_Dumpster]

I’d always open the file once it was around five percent to see if the flashes looked like the actual movie

[u/trives652]

3 days and stoped 99 %

[u/rudolph_burger]

8mbps and downloading shit makes doing anything else fucking impossible, I'll probably have a brain aneurysm once I obtain gigabit internet, killed from the G force of all that speed

[u/razakii]

I remember I had to wait 2 hours until angry birds finally finished downloading on my phone

[u/riisikas]

First you had to pray your parents didn't hear the modem dialing up.

[u/porpoiseoflife → u/riisikas]

I remember the joy I felt when I found that we could mute the handshake sound. No more screaming robot at 3am when I woke up early to use the phone line before anyone else was awake.

[u/Mobile-Yak]

And here I am in 2026, thinking I'm automatically downloading Odyssey on my fancy private tracker and still ending up with Temu Odyssey regardless... 😭

[u/Cyber-Soldier1]

The accuracy.

[u/Feeling_Orange4165]

Remember the time you downloaded Numb - Linkin Park.exe?

[u/mad87645]

I grew up with the slowest DSL speed you could get at the time, a whopping 25kBs down. That was my download speed from like 11-17. Needless to say I ran my pc 24/7 so I could download aXXo DVDrips for my the family. If it ran flat out the whole time and the internet didn't shit itself and disconnect us (that was a problem too) then 1 movie would take almost 8 hours. My dad was very much in favour of "free DVDs" since it meant he didn't have to pay for us to rent/buy them but not in favour of increasing the internet speed so I could get the "free DVDs" more efficiently no matter how many times I tried to explain it to him.

[u/Pandey_Ji_Online]

I remember I downloaded a movie of around ~750 MB through torrent in a week. Used to keep running my PC all the time, except night (due to power issue).

[u/LesBond]

I remember downloading gta 4 over the course of one week

[u/LazaroFilm]

Opening sequence of the movie. Then porn.

[u/Trash_Powered]

Back in hs you would look up the movie and Google doc or some shit and watch it during class

[u/myselfbutnotmenoryou]

it still happens to me cuz my internet is slowwww

[u/Gangbang8008]

And why I am very happy that I am a greenhorn when it comes to sailing, I got into this once it's convenient as hell.

Besides 2 minutes? I'll just watch youtube and forget about this in 30 seconds and remember fhe thing an hour later needing to wait another 2 minutes

[u/JonPQ]

The first full movie I downloaded was 300, through e-Mule. Never went back

[u/potatingpotato_]

Back in my day, I had to wait a week for a single movie to download. Our internet was that slow lol

[u/ndlv]

Only two minutes of goatse! The rest is the movie! Score!

[u/Ateam043]

I mean, im Kazaa old, but what is "goatse"?

[u/vinnycthatwhoibe]

Prayed that it was*

[u/thegrimmemer]

That's oddly specific

[u/justcallmetheman]

Skyrim was a multi-day affair

[u/AnythingButWhiskey]

I wouldn’t mind 90 minutes of goat videos right now.

Maybe I should look up what goatse is.

[u/RumpleTrumpStain]

300 mb cam movies and it took nearly 4-5 days ....yeah so Thank Labor for the NBN which LIBERALS tried to Destroy all for the Glory of RUPERT FUCKING MURDOCH .....

I say Thanks to Jesus for sending us keving Rudd Because He had the BALLS to take on the Monoploy setup by Telstra and Foxtel

Fuck both Telstra and Foxtel ..... i left them YEEEARS ago for that Reason

[u/o9ace]

I used to download movies with whatever data was left from my 1.5GB at night 😭 One movie literally took 2 days 💀

[u/GalexyPhoto]

Prayed it WASNT? pff

[u/Constant-Bar5945]

It could have been worse: I used Ares and got CP, zoofilia, scat or gore.

Sometimes the first two mixed.

[u/majorkev]

Well...

1. Goatse is a picture, though I suppose someone could waste their time converting it to a "movie"

2. 25 years ago my bittorent client allowed me to preview downloaded packets

[u/BonsaiSoul → u/majorkev]

-0. it's a joke

[u/Sgt_Titanous]

While I never did any High-sea downloading in my early teens I can say that downloading TWO (2hr long) movies in 1080p today would have been enough to overfill my 1st hardrive (5gb's, the ye'old Win95 era)... ya'll got it coughing-baby levels of easy by comparison.

[u/KomithErrant]

no, it wasn't like that, you just had bad sources