It was never about concurrency but it was way more about resilience against connection drops. You all know how unreliable dialup was of someone happened to touch a phone or a storm made the lines a bit noisy. Having a transfer fail halfway through, before browsers/oses had some concept of resuming partial downloads, was one of THE most infuriating things.
Getright was my bae in the dial-up days. Saved so many large anime downloads when someone called and broke the connection due to call waiting. Or when the speeds tapered off over the hours and I had to re-dial my ISP.
Made the content I downloaded feel more special and kept my focus more than all this instant gratification nowadays.
I took some super easy college night courses just so I could sit on their network and download floppy after floppy of Doom WADs without spending my precious minutes.
I don't remember ever needing one for concurrent downloads, just to resume one if the connection was lost or something happened. But I also don't remember downloading anything prior to being on Windows 95. 🤷♂️
I remember downloading like 20-30 parts of a single thing and having the task bar at the bottom just be full of download windows.
I remember pulling an all-nighter to make sure my Internet stayed connected and stable long enough to download Netscape Navigator. I think it was like 18MB. Previous attempts failed, and I didn't know of any download managers back then
FlashGet was my jam back in the early 2000s. Then one day it downloaded malware a malicious third party had somehow managed to inject into its updater 😒
Okay I've confused concurrency for parallel downloading. The latter browsers still don't do by default. And that's the reason I used to use download managers
34 replies
It was never about concurrency but it was way more about resilience against connection drops. You all know how unreliable dialup was of someone happened to touch a phone or a storm made the lines a bit noisy. Having a transfer fail halfway through, before browsers/oses had some concept of resuming partial downloads, was one of THE most infuriating things.
95%
96%
97%
97%
97%
97%
97%
97%
97%
97%
DOWNLOAD FAILED. Retry?
0%
0%
1%
2%...
FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU-
Someone forgot to pray to the download gods… and fickle gods they be.
Thank the lord for
wget -cFuck, I'm old.
I remember downloads having 40+ rar files so you didn't need to restart the entire download.
And the par files to validate and repair your collection of rars.
Getright was my bae in the dial-up days. Saved so many large anime downloads when someone called and broke the connection due to call waiting. Or when the speeds tapered off over the hours and I had to re-dial my ISP.
Made the content I downloaded feel more special and kept my focus more than all this instant gratification nowadays.
“Whew, gotta be careful with this one, I’m making two copies. On two floppies!”
Damn, you guys are old. I couldn't tell this apart from some latin inscriptions in Pompeii
Fun fact: The 2000 in Windows 2000 denotes that it was released 2000 years ago, meaning around the time of Emperor Augustus
Old and tired: use the release year in your product version.
New and exciting: increment all your past product versions as they age!
Your users will love it!
Download Accelerator Plus, my beloved 🥰
Ah, yes. That was the name. Then I changed it for DownThemAll! which still exists.
Yes, everything on the on the page or linked to on the page or wrapped in flash tyvm.
I remember figuring out how to boot my computer late at night to resume downloads then shut down before my dad woke up in the morning.
I took some super easy college night courses just so I could sit on their network and download floppy after floppy of Doom WADs without spending my precious minutes.
^ this person downloads
Who out here still using jdownloader?
I still do, for some things (lists of huge files). Well, I did recently, but got deleted just last week.
I still use a download manager for the bigger files. Just to be safe.
I use a torrent manager which is practically the same thing
I use them on slow sources as they open up to 8 dl streams simultaneously.
but zmodem can totally restart an interrupted tx!
Download Accelerator Plus.
I don't remember ever needing one for concurrent downloads, just to resume one if the connection was lost or something happened. But I also don't remember downloading anything prior to being on Windows 95. 🤷♂️
I remember downloading like 20-30 parts of a single thing and having the task bar at the bottom just be full of download windows.
I remember pulling an all-nighter to make sure my Internet stayed connected and stable long enough to download Netscape Navigator. I think it was like 18MB. Previous attempts failed, and I didn't know of any download managers back then
And I shall raise you this neat program
Flashget was tight
FlashGet was my jam back in the early 2000s. Then one day it downloaded malware a malicious third party had somehow managed to inject into its updater 😒
You don't now?? I think concurrency is still unavailable in modern browsers by default
Well, you've got another think coming.
Okay I've confused concurrency for parallel downloading. The latter browsers still don't do by default. And that's the reason I used to use download managers