I’m 46 and we got a 14.4 modem in around 1992-3 I think. We used gopher and ftp then later hotline to trade shareware, then warez and serialz.
I miss those days, but I don’t miss downloading 8 of 9 parts of a file and not being able to reconnect to the server for the last one.
My mom’s house is at a T intersection at the bottom of a steep hill. When it snows at least one car ends up taking out the rock wall we built when I was a kid. Then I have to come back and rebuild it before the next storm.
The last time it happened we could see the path the guy took home as the oil leaked out of his pan after mounting the wall.
It’s a 30 mph road that loops so it’s mostly only delivery people and residents, but no one has made it more than 10 feet into the yard in 30 years, though the accident rate has seemed to increase in the last 10.
I’ve been thinking of setting up a node at my local ski area, both for others to use, but also to make custom timing equipment that can send start and finish messages to the timing computer and keep us from having to haul wires up icy race courses all winter.
I’ve never actually set one up or used one yet though, so it’s probably a few years off.
That’s how I read it too. More like a fully encrypted anonymized trackerless BitTorrent client (or even more like Hotline (a pair of sort of FTP/chat/bbs client and server apps) for the older pirates in the audience.
Just whichever NPR affiliate comes in clearest on a drive.