Probably about 9 minutes for an average song over a 56 kbps connection, without disconnects or hangs. Unfortunately it rarely stayed connected without hangs and stutters, so it ended up taking a lot longer than the math suggests it should. I didn’t have a good computer though, nor good Internet. I was using some bargain basement eMachines computer. It wasn’t until a few years later that I built my first PC. If you didn’t disable automatic updates on Windows or other programs, then those downloads could end up hogging 90% of your bandwidth for the entire time you were away.
How shit does the computer have to be where the machine’s performance itself is a factor in p2p torrenting? Like, if it can run Limewire, it should be fast enough where the only relevant bottleneck is the pipe to the internet.
Internet speed and reliability of both host and client are a factor though; downloading something rare where there’s only like one guy in Burundi seeding it could take centuries.
Softmodems were painfully CPU intensive vs a hardware/controller-based modems. A slow Celeron proc, as found in most eMachines of the time, was already chugging to keep 98/Me going with everything else.
Man im old but i remember as a preteen i used limewire and morpheus to download songs much faster then you depict.
Even over dial-up it was a matter of minutes. Like y’all were downloading mp3s and not WAVs, right?
Probably about 9 minutes for an average song over a 56 kbps connection, without disconnects or hangs. Unfortunately it rarely stayed connected without hangs and stutters, so it ended up taking a lot longer than the math suggests it should. I didn’t have a good computer though, nor good Internet. I was using some bargain basement eMachines computer. It wasn’t until a few years later that I built my first PC. If you didn’t disable automatic updates on Windows or other programs, then those downloads could end up hogging 90% of your bandwidth for the entire time you were away.
How shit does the computer have to be where the machine’s performance itself is a factor in p2p torrenting? Like, if it can run Limewire, it should be fast enough where the only relevant bottleneck is the pipe to the internet.
Internet speed and reliability of both host and client are a factor though; downloading something rare where there’s only like one guy in Burundi seeding it could take centuries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem
Softmodems were painfully CPU intensive vs a hardware/controller-based modems. A slow Celeron proc, as found in most eMachines of the time, was already chugging to keep 98/Me going with everything else.
Oh wait! Reading your response just jarred my memory a little. I’m not even talking about Limewire, I’m talking about Napster! Lol.
I never really used Napster, it came to my attention basically right at the end.
You probably had broadband. I was stuck on dial-up for awhile.