On the edonkey network, the file size would be reported raw but the clients could compress and transfer chunks to each other. Some guy had created an empty IL-2 sturmovik iso and seeded it. We lived at a government facility with ill-policed high speed (for the time) internet but even then I knew that I didn’t have a 400 Mbps connection. Maybe 2002/2003.

The whole thing only transferred a few kB. It looked like an entire disc though.

Maybe I'm missing a reference or joke here, but the size of a file means little with respect to how much it can be compressed. You can get a 1 petabyte file down to a few bytes if it's just `\0` repeated over and over.

42.zip?