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I'm not sure you really remember. With 56k dialup, downloading 650MB could easily take days. Downloading 1MB could have taken 3 to 4 minutes.

60MB, even today, is really big when you have to download it while boarding a train or with poor connectivity (even in rich countries, just being in a metallic building is enough for 60MB to be painful to download.

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I remember leaving the computer on to download 650MB overnight, which used to be an ISO for an operating system. It was usually finished sometime the next day.

And 60MB would have been a couple of hours, not bad to wait for some software.

It wasn't prohibitive to do this.

Indeed, I seem to be back at square one, as downloading a AAA game for me once again takes about a day.

650,000 kb / 5 kb/s = 36 hours

Add a little line noise for the average 30-70y/o house wiring and you get 43 hours for 33.6 or 50 hours for 28.8. It took running a brand new line in order for me to get 56k. So, the parent comment is accurate.

It was absolutely prohibitive for the average person with a shared line, and the direct comparison to shared line today is a metered connection. Even in the US it can be as much as $30 per gigabyte which would make that 60MB download cost $1.80.

You download desktop apps while boarding a train?

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