I remember spending 4 hours downloading the GTA 2 demo on PC. My parents weren't happy with the phone bill later that month. But the wait was so worth it.

Yeah well I got a hernia installing office ‘97 oh no read error on disc 37 of 44.

Waited several days to download a half life patch so I could play CS that I got on a cd.

I remember downloading Debian 3.0 ISO images over what I think might have been ISDN. I didn't know you didn't need all six or seven CDs in order to install.

(It might also have been slow early DSL. I'm not sure when exactly this was or when the transition happened.)

I remember downloading the last 2 episodes of Star Trek Voyager of of an FTP server through Windows XP's Explorer. 2 WMV files of 50 megabytes each. Took all night. If a single issue had happened I would have had to start the download all over, but it worked out fine!

I got DSL a few weeks later.

I was a Slackware guy but I heard good things about Debian. So I tied up our 33.6K modem for three days downloading an ISO. My roommates were pissed but I owned the line.

Then I went to install it and the ISO was corrupted. I never got to try Debian until I joined the Air Force and downloaded it at work.

A buddy of mine was the reason quotas were set on our shell accounts at our ISP. You could dial in as PPP or just as a regular serial connection to get a login on their BSDI server. He downloaded the Win98 beta to the ISP's server and would ZModem it down from there while the rest of us were sleeping.

Between that and the time I discovered "DISPLAY=<my IP>:0 xdm" worked from our shell account I'm surprised we weren't kicked off the ISP.