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Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

I often feel that the 90's child me would slap me across the face in disgust at how casually I take for granted the age of magic we live in now.

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I distinctly remember waiting an appreciable amount of time to download a single Metallica mp3 on dialup as a middle schooler - maybe 20, 25 minutes? for a ~3 minute song - and a 2GB Linux distro took me like 30 seconds a few weeks ago.

I'm simultaneously hopeful for what we'll be doing 20, 30 years from now, but also worried that the rate of progress is slowing (because I am by definition comparing now to the very very early days of the modern internet).

I used to download full video game soundtracks. It would take me all night to download a single album, and I'd have been disconnected from the internet when I woke up in the morning because my ISP wouldn't support a connection length longer than 8 hours.

We couldn't even stream music, let alone stream video.

How long ago are you talking? Realplayer came out in 1995, I was listening to live DJs over my dialup connection in 1996.

I never had a fast or consistent enough dial-up connection to stream audio. I tried multiple times, but it never worked for me. I'd get maybe 15-30 seconds of contiguous sound, and the whole thing would fail.

I did download MP3s though. A 3mb MP3 file would usually take me approximately an hour. And I downloaded ~3,000 this way.

We had a second phone line for dial up internet - I remember spending three weeks downloading a copy of Age of Empires (roughly 250mb), praying it wouldn't be corrupt or a bad file. It downloaded successfully, but to my dismay it was the expansion. Took me another month to get the actual game to download, at least at that point I had the expansion as well :)

Torrents were a blessing. it said completed you at least knew it was OK.

Now a days with everything SSL it’s not really an issue. But I do remember getting bad HTTP/FTP downloads before encryption was a “thing”

This hit me hard a bit ago. I had hiked for an hour or so to the middle of a forest, pulled out my phone and was viewing a crystal clear live stream made by a random person on the other side of the planet, in higher quality than any movie I could have seen as a child, and it was free for both of us and needed no special equipment.

I feel the term “no special equipment” is doing a lot of heavy lifting considering how much special equipment there is in a single smartphone.

"Special" in this case being non-commodity.

> it was free for both of us

Where did you get this free cell phone and data plan?

The obvious implication is "it was at no cost beyond what I was already paying for".

We had books in the pre-internet era warning us of the corporate dystopia we potentially faced. Well, we're here. Massive benefits, but all control by massive multi-trillion dollar megacorps - easily corrupted.

It's like that scene in Spirited Away where Chihiro's parents start "pigging out".

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