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In my youth, I probably downloaded hundreds of gigabytes from wuarchive.wustl.edu, ftp.cdrom.com, metalab.unc.edu, and the like. Over a dial-up modem, no less.

Before I had local Internet access (i.e., long distance calls), I used the various "FTP by e-mail" services with my free "Juno" e-mail account (they had toll-free numbers for access!).

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"hundreds of gigabytes"? Do you mean megabytes? Don't know about you, but when I was downloading stuff from those sites, downloading "hundreds of gigabytes" would have literally have taken a few years at minimum, many decades more realistically.

200 gigabytes at 57600 bits per second is a bit under 46 weeks. They could usually sustain that bandwidth; the bottleneck was usually the modem.

When I was using dialup speed in the 90s, I certainly didn't have any gigabyte storage.

One of my favorite ways to gauge "how far we've come" is that I remember connecting to a BBS in Europe in the early 90's that boasted 30 gigabytes of downloadable files. That would have filled up about 20000 floppy disks, and barring any kind of creative phreaking would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to download.

Ah, I was at 2400 bps until I had a university ethernet connection.

Anybody remember when modems cost $1 per baud?

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