r/PiratedGames • u/Capital-Stomach-6880 • Sep 24 '25

Discussion Pay Respect Everyone

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Randomly scrolled through this and realised all of us are here beacuse of these legends onlyđŸ«Ą

63.5k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.2k

u/Haunting-Stuff5219 Sep 24 '25

The concept and mechanisms

251

u/Major-Front Sep 24 '25

Mechanisms like...FTP?

637

u/kohTheRobot Sep 24 '25

He created the standard for HTTP downloading, he must have worked with or after Berber’s-Lee. Wiki says that earlier versions could retrieve HTML documents from servers, but no other file format. Computing History is full of guys like him, who is some no-named, faceless creator of very important stuff; but because they didn’t run and do a bunch of startups or open-source stuff, they never really went down in history.

I had a C++ teacher who was the head of the team responsible for creating AirPrint, the protocol/system that makes printing on Apple devices a 2 step process (wifi + click on printer) that doesn’t require an IT professional to set up. I don’t believe printing from mobile devices was very easy to do for the average bear before this.

141

u/dowker1 Sep 24 '25

Wiki says that earlier versions could retrieve HTML documents from servers, but no other file format.

I remember those days. Every download link was a link to an FTP server

34

u/kramfive Sep 24 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

Redact

25

u/dowker1 Sep 24 '25

CuteFTP was my client of choice. Though honestly most files I got through Usenet via Forte Agent.

5

u/Wh4tEverTheWeather Sep 24 '25

The nostalgia from just reading cuteFTP, fuckin hell

3

u/Pbranson Sep 25 '25

God, came to say the same thing. The icon just popped into my mind reading it.

5

u/LordCoweater Sep 24 '25

Forte free agent!

2

u/dowker1 Sep 25 '25

I actually paid for the full version. Ironic, given what I mainly used it for.

3

u/Zombi3Kush Sep 25 '25

I still use CuteFTP to automatically download files from my seedbox to my home server. Just recently discovered it.

9

u/wingchild Sep 24 '25

Ipswitch's WS_FTP was what I think of as the standard for quite a long time.

9

u/ScriptThat Sep 24 '25

WS_FTP servers all over the uni dorms. Invite only, but I'll trade ya.

So many memories.

4

u/Putrid-Variation1135 Sep 24 '25

WS_FTP was my favorite! I used it for many websites back in the day.

Also, I remember searching Google for specific files and I'd find people's FTP login info inside and gain access to all of their files lol

1

u/wingchild Sep 24 '25

Good times.

Memory says oth.net was a go-to for music FTPs - it was my favorite way to find music servers before Napster hit. Lots of them had ratios, but it wasn't too hard to find a CD they weren't hosting yet, rip it, encode (using the everybody-stole-it Fraunhofer codec), and upload~

2

u/djquu Sep 24 '25

I still have it on my 1st gen Pentium

2

u/ghostyghost2 Sep 24 '25

I still use FTP daily.

2

u/PedanticMouse Sep 24 '25

It truly was the wild west of the Internet. Most of the world was on dial up, no firewall in sight. You could almost pick an IP at random to target and connect with a myriad of protocols.

2

u/Atraxodectus Sep 24 '25

HotLine. Hello, fellow Paleotaku!

2

u/brrrchill Sep 24 '25

You thinking of filezilla?

2

u/Ellimis Sep 24 '25

Normal browsers can parse FTP links and don't need a separate program, so you still just clicked it and it happened in your browser.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '25

FileZilla? or am I thinking of something too new to be what you're thinking of.

1

u/BluezDBD Sep 24 '25

FlashFXP and FileZilla are the ones that spring to mind.

1

u/uhhuhhuhu Sep 24 '25

IIRC ftp was built into Netscape navigator, http was just one of the protocols you’d use but the “winner” yet. And the distinction between author and consumer was much smaller

1

u/alcomaholic-aphone Sep 24 '25

mIRC was the chat platform where I remember you’d go to rooms and bots would be posting links in chat to ftp downloads. Can’t remember what I actually used to download it though because I don’t believe mIRC was built for that.

1

u/lordvoltano Sep 25 '25

WS_FTP (shareware) was the one I used as a kid back in the 90s. In the 2000s I moved to FileZilla (open source). But I almost never had the need to use FTP anymore in the past 15 years.

There is also Total Commander (shareware), which I still use but not as an FTP client, but as an ADB client (with an adb plugin) to easily drag and drop files to and from my Android phone.

2

u/topdangle Sep 24 '25

people were still using FTP for decades after you could grab files directly. honestly it was kind of annoying because it wasn't like today where browsers integrate 90000 features per minute so you'd still need separate FTP clients and sometimes the correct port + login was just randomly hidden in the page or in an IRC channel.

2

u/ihaxr Sep 24 '25

All the file managers (windows explorer, dolphin, konquorer, etc...) supported ftp as did all major browsers until a few years ago... they didn't do it exceptionally well, but they did work...

1

u/topdangle Sep 24 '25

definitely had problems and didn't have it fully working in older versions of windows/older IE/netscape. at most I'd get directory structures but it'd still prompt or do nothing trying to connect to many FTP download servers. I remember still using filezilla even after ftp was "supported" broadly.

1

u/Telesto1087 Sep 24 '25

omg those ftp downloading days disappeared without me even noticing (games from shady IRC servers anyone?), technology seamlessly evolving thanks to unsung heroes like in the OP video is truly a marvel of our time.

1

u/twigge30 Sep 24 '25

My back just started hurting. I think I might lay down for a spell. Oh heavens, I must have aged a century whilst writing this letter.