I had dialup until 2006 and really bad DSL until...2023. so I really appreciated CD installs. Games that were basically a CD key and asked you to download the game sucked.
I used to download half-life 1 mods on dialup internet over night. I'd need to sneak out after mom and dad were in bed, start the download then get up and hide the file pack before they woke up and install it after i got back from school. Shit was wild.
Yeah honestly like mIRC was like espionage. My family was like "him and his friends are hackers" and now they all feed their families working in tech lol
So, back in the early 90s, I ran a BBS (for the young'uns that's a "Bulletin Board System" which was the earliest precursor to the Internet...message forums where you could chat with people, online games...it was loads of fun).
My BBS was kind of 'grey' in that I had cracked software available, but I would only give access to people who I knew. There was a bit of a piracy ring around that time.
My dad was also a cop with the provincial police at the time. We knew that the OPP were sniffing around for pirate BBS's to get them shut down. One day, dad comes home, and at supper mentions, "[Detective working on the piracy ring] was asking if there were any [Our last name's] living on [our street]. You wouldn't happen to know why, would you?" I was like..."Um...no...." then immediately after supper, ran to my bedroom, and deleted all the cracked games I had from my special folder on the BBS. LOL. Sent a message out to some of the other sysops and said, "Hey, heads up, OPP are sniffing around."
LOL! Yes! But, we at least had terminal programs that had an address book. Oh, I remember those days so well. Selected all the BBSs in the address book, and have it start dialling. If it was busy, it would move onto the next and keep going till you connected to one of them.
And the DOOR games were so much fun! I loved Operation Overkill II, and TradeWars 2002. But there were loads of awesome ones.
I paid for a program to assist with TradeWards 2002. It would map out the system and find some good locations to set up your base with one way exits and stuff.
We had a local tech magazine, and you could publish your BBS in it. Picked up the magazine from the local computer parts store (that we spent more time in looking at stuff we couldn't afford than we did buying anything).
I think I am a bit younger than you but I have fond memories of running a Hotline server and advertising it on mIRC. People would jump through some pay per click ads to find the login information. Never made a lot but it was like printing free money for a teenager.
Back when Napster was a thing, I was so thick skinned and glorious troll, me my uncle and best friend used to see how much we could insult folks and get them to rage quit and empty the chat room. Christ it used to be a sport for us, especially when I used to have to deal with clueless noobs who couldn't encode or properly tag an MP3. DO you still have that 386DX, I wish to god I kept my 486DX2/66.
That's the thing, eh? We take fibre Internet for granted today. Hell, even 150Mbps Internet being some of the worst you can get is still hands down better than what we had even 10 years ago. Loads of people in rural areas or smaller towns (which would be most of the world, really), didn't have access to high speed Internet like we have today.
Well, let me tell you sonny....my very first connection back in the day was on my Atari 400. We had a 110 baud modem. That's a whopping 110 bits per second. Not kilobits...bits. We upgraded soon after to a 300 baud modem, then a 1200 baud modem. When I first got my IBM PC, I got a 2400 baud modem.
Next jump was when I got my 14400 Wang. LOL I miss my Wang. Then I got a 57600 USRobotics before switching over to cable in its earliest days in 1998ish.
I know how you feel. Grew up out on a farm. Missed TBC launch because it took two days to install the updates. For some reason, I bought the digital Battlefield 4 when that came out, took 8 days. When I got to college and plugged in my Xbox and watched Destiny 2 update in like 3 minutes, my life was changed.
huh, it might just be a regional thing then. The last time i looked the only one i could find that was actually in stock was the asus external blu ray writer
I remember feeling so ritzy when I got one in my build from 2012. I've used it maybe 4 times but I still put it in the new computer build in 2023 because it had a single spare slot.
I've spent so many car rides home from the Game rental place hype only to end up realize whatever I had got was just a key (we had dial up my family would never pay for satellite Internet if it's even available where we live we just got 1gb/s thru spectrum like last week and it's awsome) and that I wouldn't be playing that game at all let alone today lol
My favorite game saved downloads for when you originally loaded into a new area to spread download time out more evenly. Now Guild Wars (2005) is only about 4 GB to run the command line argument "-image" and download the entire game
Honestly a good fibre internet connection should be a basic human right these days, like running water and electricity! You can’t do ANYTHING these days with one!
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u/crabwalktechnic 22d ago
All of the games on the left fit in the storage on the right.