The early days of downloading were a fun time

  • platypus_plumba@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    Still remember my father’s face when he realized I was sharing all his personal documents with Limewire.

    My internet was so slow that I was tweaking all the settings and doing pattern analysis on bandwidth traffic with nonsense tweaks. So I probably tweaked that setting and felt the internet was 10kbps faster.

    I also recall placing the modem under a blanket because I thought the internet was faster when the modem was warmer. My father’s face when he saw the modem had melted… and the flabbergasted repair technicians theorizing that our house was probably hit by a thunder and it caught fire somehow. Little did they know.

    I was just a desperate kid willing to try anything to be able to download 1 song per day.

        • Leviathan@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          6 months ago

          Nah a lot of people thought her name was Heather Brooke because Heather and a girl named Brooke were in a video and some early internet user named the bootleg video Heather Brooke. Many people, including this reporter, were under the mistaken impression that that was her name. Her actual name is Heather Harmon.

          • WarlockLawyer@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            6 months ago

            Thank you. I knew there was something like that but couldn’t remember the exact names of each person. Also what the hell? Why is this what I care about remembering.

            • Leviathan@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              6 months ago

              I don’t know. I can’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday but I can remember the mousetrap jingle word for word.

              Life’s funny that way.

        • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          6 months ago

          I think this ladies name was wifey or something like that. Amateur wasn’t my thing back then but I recall it being part of the name.

  • Why9@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    6 months ago

    I tried to download a music video on limewire once. I was pretty computer illiterate back then and around 13 years old at the time when a friend at school showed me how to download things.

    That music video turned out to be a woman being murdered at point blank range. It was ~5 seconds of my life but that video has never left my mind. It was far too early for video editing and far too ‘amateur’ to be a movie production. The way she begged for the guy to stop before he pulled the trigger, it was definitely real.

    • lichtmetzger@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Had a similar experience, but it was a video of a guy who got run over by a truck, or in more accurate terms…smushed into its radiator. There was not a lot left that could be recognized as a normal human body, but he was still alive and crying for help.

      I’ll also never forget that, fucking traumatizing thing. I believe the Nokia phone camera quality which was usual back then made it even worse, because there were missing details you couldn’t see, only imagine.