• I don’t remember ever needing one for concurrent downloads, just to resume one if the connection was lost or something happened. But I also don’t remember downloading anything prior to being on Windows 95. 🤷‍♂️

    I remember downloading like 20-30 parts of a single thing and having the task bar at the bottom just be full of download windows.

  • Toes♀@ani.social
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    22 hours ago

    I remember downloads having 40+ rar files so you didn’t need to restart the entire download.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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      15 hours ago

      I still do, for some things (lists of huge files). Well, I did recently, but got deleted just last week.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    It was never about concurrency but it was way more about resilience against connection drops. You all know how unreliable dialup was of someone happened to touch a phone or a storm made the lines a bit noisy. Having a transfer fail halfway through, before browsers/oses had some concept of resuming partial downloads, was one of THE most infuriating things.

  • percent@infosec.pub
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    1 day ago

    I remember pulling an all-nighter to make sure my Internet stayed connected and stable long enough to download Netscape Navigator. I think it was like 18MB. Previous attempts failed, and I didn’t know of any download managers back then

    • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      Fun fact: The 2000 in Windows 2000 denotes that it was released 2000 years ago, meaning around the time of Emperor Augustus

      • folekaule@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Old and tired: use the release year in your product version.

        New and exciting: increment all your past product versions as they age!

        Your users will love it!

  • ashitaka@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Getright was my bae in the dial-up days. Saved so many large anime downloads when someone called and broke the connection due to call waiting. Or when the speeds tapered off over the hours and I had to re-dial my ISP.

    Made the content I downloaded feel more special and kept my focus more than all this instant gratification nowadays.

    • X@piefed.world
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      1 day ago

      Made the content I downloaded feel more special…

      “Whew, gotta be careful with this one, I’m making two copies. On two floppies!”

    • NOPper@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      I took some super easy college night courses just so I could sit on their network and download floppy after floppy of Doom WADs without spending my precious minutes.

  • 58008@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    FlashGet was my jam back in the early 2000s. Then one day it downloaded malware a malicious third party had somehow managed to inject into its updater 😒

  • myszka@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    You don’t now?? I think concurrency is still unavailable in modern browsers by default

      • myszka@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Okay I’ve confused concurrency for parallel downloading. The latter browsers still don’t do by default. And that’s the reason I used to use download managers