Longest download time????

**chris-harry** · 01-04-2005, 05:25 AM

ok. i just got ADSL, and its alot faster then dial up... wow... cool... anyway... it use to take me 10 days just to download a 90Mb file, now it only takes me an hour at the most... and this got me thinking...

how long do you guys spend downloading things before you give up? mine would be 10 days...

**eco2geek** · 01-04-2005, 10:37 AM

Back in the early '90s, when I was on Compuserve and had a 14.4 modem, it used to take about an hour to download a floppy disk's worth of data. (IIRC the fastest I ever got over the phone line was 28.8.) It didn't stop me from downloading a ton of stuff.

The cool thing was, my first "real" ISP ran FreeBSD, and I could log into a shell account using a terminal emulator, download something big over his fat pipe to a temp directory on his hard drive, and then ftp it from his computer to mine. (That was my first introduction to Un*x, too.)

**chris-harry** · 01-04-2005, 11:02 AM

man the memories of the internet... i am such a newie... and n00b, that i dont have such memories yet... *sigh*...

**eco2geek** · 01-04-2005, 12:14 PM

My favorite Internet memories of the mid-90s are of 1) how Compuserve, totally repulsed by the way AOL users acted on Usenet, decided that they would make you manually type in the name of any Usenet newsgroup you wanted to join, without providing a list; and 2) how most web sites looked, with grey backgrounds, default blue underlined links, etc. before web pages got really complicated.

**firebyrd10** · 01-04-2005, 05:09 PM

Back on the 14.4 I'd say 10 days was my max. Of course I never downloaded anything that would take that long.

Now I'd give 2 days per gig.

**chris-harry** · 01-05-2005, 02:51 AM

what do you guys have... cable, T1, T3??? i dont know any other faster ones???

2 days per gig... wow... i would give at least 3 for me... although i did download the half-life demo (0.7 gig), in 2... which is pritty good.

**Markus** · 01-05-2005, 09:33 AM

The speed kind of depends on your ADSL, since you asked I've got 1 MB in / 512k out, so a 700MB iso takes ~1,5 h.
Beats the he.. out of BBS's with a 14k

Of course the download speed depends on a lot of other things as well along the route to the sourcefile. Check your real speed with a speedcheck preferably located in your own country. There's some to find if you google.

**firebyrd10** · 01-06-2005, 01:00 AM

Originally Posted by chris-harry

what do you guys have... cable, T1, T3??? i dont know any other faster ones?

Cable for me, and this might help http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/...ch.php?a=types

**Jameson** · 01-06-2005, 02:45 AM

The longest download I remember was downloading Trumpet Winsock on a Windows 3.1 notebook (then again it was almost a competition when it came to install time vs. download time), I'm not exactly sure how long it took but I do remember not liking long downloads because I had to share a 2nd line for dial-up and download managers with resume weren't as common in most browsers. I just finished downloading a Debian ISO (650MB) and that took about 30 - 35 minutes and it averaged 300KB down, but I've had 1,200KB down also so it just depends on were I'm downloading from sometimes.

what do you guys have... cable, T1, T3??? i dont know any other faster ones?

If you think those are up there try an OC3 or OC8 line, even when T3's the computer can only take advantage of so much but with faster sites its almost like changing the channel on a TV.

**firebyrd10** · 01-06-2005, 04:20 AM

Originally Posted by Jameson

If you think those are up there try an OC3 or OC8 line, even when T3's the computer can only take advantage of so much but with faster sites its almost like changing the channel on a TV.

I wouldn't mind an OC-255