Comment by rektide
5 years ago
It was a great age, but your particulars, accentuating being ultra-elite & the drive to be first does not resonate with me or what the priorities I saw were.
0-day scene was always there but seemed like madmen, delusional people. I far more enjoyed queueing for some site with an interesting collection; eventually snagging 1 of 10 connections, each with like 30Kbps bandwidth. Much more interesting to me than getting or sharing the freshest hottest warez. Alas, the modern torrent scene seems largely reverted to 0-day mania, to ratios instead of leech (even in bittorrent lands, alas!), to throw-away uninteresting downloads, instead of the far more interesting to me curated & considered content.
Also, your ftp program of choice is interesting. I'm not sure if it really had any noteable following at the time? I'm trying to pin my timeline down but I feel like things were pretty well underway by the first non-Visual-Basic release, FlashFXP, in June 1998. I mean, like, dude evidently was convinced to re-author his stuff via the much better known (afaik) LeapFTP author... I'd love an inventory of what really was popular at the time, what people would swear by. I'm far from elite, as I've already semi-confessed, but hadn't heard of FlashFXP.
That said, holy shit yes I'd buy a coffee-table book of warez scene aesthetics. The crackers & nfo files & (music) tracker files were great, just awesome.
Flashfxp was able to set up transfers between ftp sites, so you could transfer a file from A to B at 100 mbit/s from your 1.1/2.2 Adsl connection C.
I recall it also had a decent queue and resume.
There was also a terminal ftp client that supported the server to server transfers, but I can’t remember the name.
ADSL connection!? I had a mate who used to use flashfxp to push stuff around with a 56k modem....
You might be remembering pftp, which had a few modded versions (mew6, "shit").
What do you mean queuing? Are you thinking of the xdcc channels on IRC where end users would download releases (with publicly declared throttles) from typically hacked consumer computers on high speed dsl or cable connections (typically via netbios and no admin password)? Or just public FTPs (honeypots) of some sort?
The entire intro of this book covers the concept of prestige between topsites. A SE or CH topsite with OC3 and 2tb with top tier affils was obviously amazing. The need to be first was important, that was kind of the whole point. This is evidenced by groups releasing dupes getting said release nuked, the whole concept of racing (users simultaneously uploading zip/rxx files) with the sitebot declaring a winner based on % uploaded and site level nukes by a sitebot if the release was pre'd more than X minutes prior.
0day was the side door into a lot of sites. There was so much shareware that could be patched or unlocked with a serial with relatively little effort vs AAA game or movie releases. If your group affilled (initiate their releases on affiled site) you would be able to get a number of leech accounts (way more valuable than ratio accounts) on said site based on how prestigious your group was. Couriers were more disposable, as they had no ties to a release group (there were courier groups). Their primary function was to increase "liquidity" of content between different tiers of sites.
you sound like someone that would just use leech ftp :D
Flash FXP was used because it had site to site transfer, where you could use the FTP protocol directly from one server to another, therefore you would not need to upload a file to 100 servers with 5kbs but would be able to upload it once and send it directly over to the next node at 100mbits or more. Not many clients got the fxp protocol just as right as they do =)