Re: Ot: 6 or 7 nights to download a CD (was: Re: RJ-11 phone line)
On 10/8/21, rhkramer@gmail.com <rhkramer@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, October 07, 2021 07:43:02 AM Dan Ritter wrote:
>> Note that a minimal Debian install is around 500 MB, which would
>> take around 24 hours of a perfect 56K modem connection.
>
> I can remember when I got a fast modem (I forget if it was 28 or 33 kbps)
> and
> felt it was now reasonable to download an entire CD, doing it in 6 or 7
> nights
> (stopping it every morning to use the Internet for other stuff, restarting
> it
> every night.)
>
> (Wait, hopefully, that wasn't me that did that, maybe it was my grandfather
You were lucky to be able to continue on. Those were the days when
that wasn't an almost demanded prerequisite as part of a download
manager, e.g. wget's "-c / --continue" flag. Connections were so
flaky, so unstable that even a 3 or 4 megabyte sized file was an all
day event.
The last year that I was on dialup, the local provider suddenly sped
up to maybe taking an hour to download those same 3 or 4 megabyte
files. As it turned out, I was about the only person left using their
dialup server. It was faster because there was no competing web
traffic from other ISP customers.
There was one download manager that sold itself because it focused on
being able to continue on without having to restart the download.
Whatever that one in-browser manager was, that was my HERO for a
number of years... until I discovered wget. Once in a while there will
be a "gatekeeper" (cookie reliant) instance where wget also doesn't
work still and though.
The World needs to obsolete anything that's slower than the cheap
service I'm using right now (whatever it is). Speedier Internet
connections are a LIFE-altering necessity in the Age of Technology.
Beyond that, COVID-19 has turned quality of at-home Internet service
into a checkpoint regarding one's employability.
Cindy :)
--
Cindy-Sue Causey
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *
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