Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinpaulson | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of using oth.net to browse ftps for tracks in late 1990s. I used to burn custom mixes for friends in high school back then before napster exploded and everyone had a burner. On a 28.8 or even 56k connection it was an amazingly tedious process to download tracks from ftps. It is pretty insane how you can download an entire discography today in the amount of time it took to download some single tracks back then. oth.net is still active today it looks like, crazy.

View on HN

I made some pretty good beer money running one of those FTP sites by making people download Bonzai buddy for a password. I feel a bit bad for advancing that purple ape, but at least I could increase my sysadmin skills on something that didn't matter.

+1. I was running an FTP server on one of the few multi-honed T3 connections (late 90's) in our city. OTH sent me a ton of traffic, which also included RIAA scouts. I almost lost my job after they sent a C&D to our IT department; I was ~16 years old at the time and was forgiven.

Be glad that was 20 years ago. If you did it today, you'd have a felony...

It's all relative. I moved out of my parents house and left behind my old computer and 56k modem. I came back a few months later and found my brother had BearShare or something running with all these downloads trickling it at .5 kbps, and found that he had amassed hundreds of megabytes of MP3's.

I remember those days - I used to download mixes, albums, tracks over ISDN, which was basically an all-night affair. Getting up in the morning in anticipation of listening to a new Global Underground compilation is something that just rarely happens these days. Not having everything readily available made me appreciate the smaller, but carefully selected collection I maintained.

I still buy lots of music, since I prefer to own my collection and don't want to rely on a streaming service. However these days I find myself to be much quicker to hit the skip button and enjoying a new album is more often than not a short lived pleasure. The downside of modern conveniences I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com