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Legends say the file is still downloading
real Gs used download managers to be able to resume later.
that wasn’t even a guarantee in my day. a lot of webservers didn’t support resume.
Is resume just client/server support for byte serving requests? Pretty sure that was around with HTTP/1.1 in the late 90s, but my memory of it was client support in Netscape for downloads wasn’t really there, so most people probably never used it.
idk the technical specifics on it but standards were mostly loosely followed suggestions back then. i still run in to issues today with some downloads not even knowing the total size. i just remember being on dial up and hoping if i let it go all night i wouldn’t have to start anew in the morning.
And concurrency. Pulling a mean 30k/s on that v90 modem.
GetRight ftw. I just googled it and it’s still a thing.
Now, burning CDs at 2x speed on windows 98 was a chore. Converting a whole disc with of mp3’s and not breathing on your computer for 40 minutes so it didn’t freeze and ruin an expensive CDR sucked.
GetRight
wow, it even looks almost exactly like it did back then!
I use Filezilla these days.
I came to the comments hoping someone posted this. Its a classic and many young’ins will never know the pain.
Good ol’ days when I used to leave the computer on downloading 1 GB of software overnight, and I would pray to the gods in the morning that it hadn’t aborted halfway through.
Download managers, when they worked anyway.
deleted by creator
Poor guy is probably still waiting for cc32e47.exe to finish downloading. Should be done in the next ten years or so.
Netscape was bloatware, even by today’s standards. Though to be fair, nothing back then was standard so you might as well pack all the libraries in one big ole sloppy zip
So much this.
Download? This happened even while copying files or installing games/software off a CD.
Don’t most torrent clients do these types of estimates? (Of course you can resume a torrent though.)
Yeah, but the estimates are not as terrible. You have to average the download speed over some time period, so that the estimate doesn’t shoot towards infinity when the download speed falters for a moment.
Not awfully complex to implement, but for whatever reason Microsoft didn’t bother for quite while, even after they already had a reputation for terrible estimates.
Using the Transmission torrent client, I’ve seen the estimates go into years.
Ahh, FlashGet, you used to be a beautiful thing. At least before they turned it into an adware shitfest. Glad I migrated off Windows before then.
When you came back in the room it wouldn’t be saying 3 minutes or 52 years. It would be saying ‘are you sure you want to move file xxxxx.xxx’ and it would have been saying that since you left the room.
Hhhhhhhh
Isn’t that how Windows still works?
Windows admin here, YES it fucking is, this is why we robocopy.
And then your brother picked up the phone to call his girlfriend…
No, no, he was in his room painting his airfix. It was my sister who did the picking up the phone to call her boyfriend and her other friends. We argued A LOT about this.
LOL
This is why I bought GetRight.
What a great program!
NTFS is still soo slow compared to any file operation i do on Linux.
Linux: “I’m gonna copy this GB file instantly, and hope you don’t call sync any time soon”
Absolutely awful when it’s some flash drive that just slows down to nothing at which point you’d rather cancel the tranfer, but you can’t, but you also can’t unmount because it’s busy, so you just accept the loss, unplug and then re-format.
I only know how to add stuff to fstab with sync option, but what about other drives? I don’t want to manually mount everything.
I don’t want to manually mount everything.
Heh, I literally do – it’s become so automatic it’s not even a pain point anymore
You could use a custom udev rule: https://linuxmind.dev/2025/09/02/auto-mount-usb-with-udev-rules/
Not sure if auto-mounting is what you want though.
Fun fact: Even if the estimation were correct, you wouldn’t have had to wait 34yrs anyways since it didn’t took that long to get better network speed
