Heh, I had a 33k6 and my buddy across (an admittedly small) town only had a 14k4. It was often faster for him to ask me to download something, and then he’d hop on his bike, ride to my place, grab the floppy, and ride home.

That, and FidoNet! Nothing like a 12-year-old arguing his clearly superior opinions on a high latency global message board!

Fond fond memories.

Edit: also got my first functional Linux distro over dialup (Slackware). Floppies were expensive too, so I somehow figured out that I could download the A packages (core system), and a small subset of the N packages (networking) to floppies, and then bootstrap my way from there. Basically just grabbed PPP, the command-line FTP client, and Lynx, did the install, and then downloaded the X11 packages and Netscape from there.