IRC, there where bots you could talk to. You could ask them what they got and download it. Worked like a charm, even for bigger files.
DDL, direct downloads, simple websites where you got links to download what you want.
eMule/eDonkey, those where running on my brothers machine day and night and rather good. There were links like bittorrent links back then. AFAIK you could start a DL pause it and switch to another hoster if the first one died.
I know there was a large piracy scene centered around AOL chat rooms. With AOL, once an attachment was uploaded to an email once, it could be forwarded endlessly without re-uploading the attachment.
Therefore there were dedicated "uppers" who would be given access to private scene FTP dumps. These uppers would create sequences of emails with files attached for various releases (usually individual rar or zip files).
They would forward the emails to people who ran bots in the chat rooms. You could request a list of files, and then a sequence of emails based by typing commands in chat. Since the files had already been uploaded, it was very fast for the chat bots to forward the emails as they were requested.
It was actually a pretty cool system. I remember calling AOL and giving them a story about how I needed to send email newsletters for my church, so could they please "whitelist" my account. Once that happened, you could send as much email as you wanted without being flagged.
I love this thread because it peels back layers of time. I'll go next: There was piracy on the BBSes! :) And let's not forget the binaries groups on Usenet.
I ran into a story about a guy in the UK that ended up involved in the piracy scene surrounding that platform.
The basic story was that in the UK there were a number of Amiga centric magazines printed. And in the back of them were several pages of classified ads. Amongst them were people offering to swap disks for disks via mail. You sent them a stack of disks and a list of what you wanted, and they would send you back what they had on that list.
So he put up a small ad, and got a few small envelopes. Over time this snowballed into him investing in multiple add-on drives and dedicating whole weekends to copying disks.
Indeed. In many cases, it would have been faster to drive across town and borrow the disk than to wait on a download. In my experience, with my 14.4k modem, downloading a 1 MB file took about an hour. If you're talking about long-distance BBS connections, unless you knew how to make free long-distance phone calls, it would be generally cheaper to buy the damn thing.
Human nature's funny. Societies have been fighting about the same things for a long time. My sister's friend used to burn and sell CDs and had pretty much all of the popular music from the time. If we go back further we can point at examples of 'piracy' brought about by the Gutenberg Press. (A beautiful machine by the way if you ever get a chance to see one operate.)
> My sister's friend used to burn and sell CDs and had pretty much all of the popular music from the time.
I think "piracy" is usually two different things: illicit copying for profit, and illicit copying for sharing. My first introduction was through sharing: cassette tapes for the vic20 and c64. Then floppies for the Amiga. Then BBSs (that where free to access, less the fee the phone companies took).
I think my first introduction to copying for (small) profit was around the time of the first affordable cd burners. Some people financed their cd burners this way -- and some made real money.
I never used Napster -- so I can't really comment. But with IRC and ftp sites -- things were again back to copying for sharing (no fee). Same for DC++/Direct Connect -- people ran hubs out of love, for fun -- and in many ways I'd say they were more distributed than torrent sites -- in the sense that there were many small (compared to the Pirate Bay) hubs, and there was more of a sense of community.
And again, no ads, no money involved.
I hope we'll see the rise of more distributed networks (eg: freenet) run by the users themselves, without any central orchestration -- and without an artificial ad-financed gateway like TPB. We'll see.
It's a shame Netflix can't just change to distributing torrents, as they'd never be allowed to license the content like that.
What I recall is when you used the IRC bots you were queued, sometimes behind hundreds of people. And then while downloading your or their connection would hiccup, and you would get re-queued.
I remember using IRC quite a bit, there were even sites that you could search and then go join the channel and talk to the bot for the ftp transfer etc. In hindsight FTP ratio requirements were sort of like the torrent ratio requirements some trackers implement.
IRC, there where bots you could talk to. You could ask them what they got and download it. Worked like a charm, even for bigger files.
DDL, direct downloads, simple websites where you got links to download what you want.
eMule/eDonkey, those where running on my brothers machine day and night and rather good. There were links like bittorrent links back then. AFAIK you could start a DL pause it and switch to another hoster if the first one died.