Hacker News Reader

Comment by _int3_ | Hacker News Reader

I used sneakernet years ago, mostly as a last mile connection to internet. I would go to place with more bandwidth , download stuff burn it to CD , or save it on external hard drive, and go back.

I think many people still do it like that. There are 3.7 B people in the World without internet.

View on HN

Back in the day when I went to what you could describe as an engineering high-school we had very limited internet in the dormitory as well as at home. So we organized into teams, where the leader would gather Warez links for his teammates to download during the weekend. On Sunday and Monday, back at the dorm, we would upload all the series, movies and stuff to our data hoarders ftp server, giving many more people access, who in turn would copy the stuff to USB HDDs to carry it to school. There it got copied to our classmates storage and from there it got distributed throughout the region, reaching I don't know how many people. My team, doing mostly series and games, had about 10-16MBits, all teams together reached an unheard of (for consumer internet in that region) bandwidth. We just couldn't have done it alone

Good times

I ran an open CIFS volume (windows share) in our dorm for music and movies. This was just after Napster went down but before Limewire or something. So the only way to share music was to upload everything you had and have access to whatever everyone else uploaded. You just dropped what you had in a writable folder and it would organize it in read only folders, doing any deduping for identical files and flagging non-identical files with the same meta or anything it didn’t understand.

This reminds me of Angelfire's ftp setup. You got free hosting, but to upload, you had to upload to their open ftp server and use the control panel to copy files into your webspace. The files on the FTP server had an expiration of so many hours, but was otherwise unrestricted. You could upload files larger than what you could use in your free space. It became rather interesting to just browse what people were uploading to the FTP server. I eventually found some people were just using it to transfer files, and some were using it like a message board, dropping .txt notes to each other. These notes were usually just things to indicate some larger file that was being uploaded.

I did the same, going to my dad's workplace. I had no USB drives, but pushed CD-RWs and multisession CDs to their limits. Cool times!

I've been having to do that in Silicon Valley because of the data caps on our crappy Quest internet service. I take my MacBook Pro in to work, download new SDKs, customer memory dumps, etc, then hoof it back home to work on them

Reply on news.ycombinator.com