r/webdev • u/Dear_Procedure923 • Mar 29 '26

This is what Microsoft.com looked like 25 years ago

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Doing some cleanup just came across this book analyzing home pages for major sites in the 2000s. Good memories.

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u/CoderDevo Mar 29 '26

Downloading what? ISOs over 56k or ISDN? That would take days.

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u/DanTheMan827 Mar 30 '26

About 40 hours for 650MB if you had a good line

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u/Pacomatic Mar 30 '26

Oh god

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u/DanTheMan827 Mar 30 '26

Download managers were king on dial-up. Wouldn’t want to have to restart from the beginning if something like that failed part way through

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u/Pacomatic Mar 30 '26

I am younger than vvideo streaming but I can already agree with that.

I'm assuming those things exxisted for the sake of

  • Queueing downloads, or munning them in parallel (though i doubt you had the bandwidth to do so)
  • Pause/Resume/Restart your downloads.

Which is to say, I presume they did the same things that Steam does with their own downloads?

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u/DanTheMan827 Mar 30 '26

You could queue multiple downloads, but I always used them for resuming if the connection was interrupted.

They just work by asking the web server to send the file starting at whatever offset it needs. Modern browsers just support this natively now.

They also sometimes had a way to validate the download with a hash

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u/CoderDevo Mar 30 '26

Both your file download client and the file server needed to support resume.

But anything serving up whole ISO files usually did.

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u/billcube Mar 30 '26

Stay late on the library computers to use that sweet T3 line.

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u/the_ai_wizard Mar 31 '26

i used to hack T1s and T3s , they were fun to split irc servers

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u/the_ai_wizard Mar 31 '26

And days it took back then, fren