The pain was that you had no idea what the image really contained until it was downloading. Sure, thumbnails existed, but they were like 20x20. So you didn’t know if you were getting someone naked, or someone wearing a beige body suit or some other nonsense.
About halfway through you could usually make a judgement call on whether you wanted to finish the download or try a different picture.
35 minutes? That’s child’s play. I used to queue up 2-3 songs in the morning on Limewire Napster and hope they’d be finished downloading by the time I got home from work. Half the time there was still a couple hours left for the last song.
Probably about 9 minutes for an average song over a 56 kbps connection, without disconnects or hangs. Unfortunately it rarely stayed connected without hangs and stutters, so it ended up taking a lot longer than the math suggests it should. I didn’t have a good computer though, nor good Internet. I was using some bargain basement eMachines computer. It wasn’t until a few years later that I built my first PC. If you didn’t disable automatic updates on Windows or other programs, then those downloads could end up hogging 90% of your bandwidth for the entire time you were away.
How shit does the computer have to be where the machine’s performance itself is a factor in p2p torrenting? Like, if it can run Limewire, it should be fast enough where the only relevant bottleneck is the pipe to the internet.
Internet speed and reliability of both host and client are a factor though; downloading something rare where there’s only like one guy in Burundi seeding it could take centuries.
Softmodems were painfully CPU intensive vs a hardware/controller-based modems. A slow Celeron proc, as found in most eMachines of the time, was already chugging to keep 98/Me going with everything else.
When I first used Napster I installed it on the school computer and used the audio out to record it on my Minidisc player. It was quite fast at the time, got like two or three songs per lesson
I’m not that old. I’m just old enough to send song trough bluetooth from friend to friend and it took ages. also good luck trying to watch porn since only device capable of that is the family computer
Haha, my dad used the computer for porn one time. He was completely tech illiterate and didn’t know it kept a record. Silly stuff like “titfucking.com” and “bigboobybikerchicks.com”. He just .com’d whatever crossed his mind.
He told my mom he only got on there to play space cadet pinball. He was seriously gonna let me and my brother take the fall. I don’t blame him though. My mom can be batshit crazy and porn to her would be no different than cheating.
My brother and I would have been nagged at and grounded. He had to go stay at my grandma’s for a month. Haha
God I was so mad that he tried to blame us. Like, yeah, I was looking at porn. I covered my damn tracks and don’t give a shit about big booby biker chicks.
The stigma against watching porn while married among older generations is an interesting one. I’m not gonna say it was wrong, but I find it hard to make myself care. If my fiance finds something nice, I’d just prefer that he share it with me lol
Once when some friends and I had a hotel room to ourselves while their dad and his GF had a different room, I discovered that if you switched to the ppv channel and quickly started toggling the volume either up or down and continued doing this for 15-30 seconds, the channel would not scramble for about 5 minutes. You could then switch away and back and do the volume thing again.
I learned in my late teens that the channels were scrambled by a little filter in the cable line at the main connector box on the street. So I removed mine, and then charged other people to unblock their cable. I subsidized my beer money for a while by going to people’s houses, breaking into their cable boxes, and removing their filters. In my early 20’s I managed to get my hands on some of the tags that the cable companies put on your cable line when it’s supposed to be connected, and some black boxes, and then I charged people to hook up their free cable. It was a pretty rad gig for a while.
Then you listen to your recording enough that the D.J.'s voice at the end becomes a part of the song in your mind and it feels incomplete when you hear it without.
That still happens to me all the time, as a big fan of jam bands like Phish and the 'Dead there are quite a few songs where a specific concert rendition is ‘the correct one’ and the album version sounds wrong.
I still remember when my brother called our radio station to see if they had the new Megadeth album that hadn’t been released yet. On our tape, we got the DJ saying “And here’s some new Megadeth for you off their new album Cryptic Writings. We’re not even supposed to be playing this yet!”
Fast walking home from school to catch Total Request Live on MTv at 3:30, hoping your favorite song didn’t drop in the ranking today because that means it will play earlier and you will not get to hear it today (and that song is Objects in the Rear View Mirror by Meatloaf).
Those also existed back then, in addition to actual IRL bullying well into adulthood. You either learned how to fight, and got into a few, or you were subjected to relentless bullying throughout your life.
Their bullying is way more intrusive and emotionally damaging. We never SWATted each other or to use an app to anonymously and constantly message each other to kill yourself
It’s odd, they do seem generally more inclusive and less cliquey, but humans are humans, and that means bullying still happens. The really intense stuff has been empowered by internet anonymity (or short of that, a lack of physical presence and the accompanying repercussions), perfect for your prototypical emotionally damaged coward of a bully.
For those who don’t go nuclear, it seems like the main thing is exclusion, but it can be hard to decide when that moves from them simply associating with the people they want, to passive aggressive bullying. I’m sure the number of people cruelly left off the “new” group text for some bullshit reason is pretty large though.
From what I can tell talking to teachers, the public bullying among Gen Z has ebbed (excluding anything gang-related) but the private stuff is way worse. My guess is it’s related, given how performative social media is and how much of an influence it has on Gen Z. Not saying Millenials are immune, but we came up in a society that actively cautioned against putting too much of yourself online whereas Gen Z grew up in a post-Facebook society that encouraged it.
Also, behaviors generally across the board are worse post-pandemic. It’s apparently like no one knows how to be nice to each other anymore.
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