My first Piratey adventure on the Internet open seas with Cable & Wirelesses 50p call deal.
In the days before a fixed fee for broadband you had to pay by the minute for dialup internet access. An expensive game for online addicts such as myself.

Fortunately C&W started to offer a deal that no local call would cost more than 50p over the weekend, clearly aimed at voice calls. As my mate and I were on Demon internet which had local dialup nodes throughout the country we saw a golden opportunity.

ATDT01625509666 *beep beep beep screeeeeech* was the start of our freetard internet nirvana.

It felt good sticking it to the man as we connected on a friday night and stayed connected all weekend for only 50p, disconnects allowing. Sadly there were usually a couple of DCs over each weekend but a whole weekends net for only £1.50 or so was awesome.

Because of this we decided to investigate the newsgroups and amongst the filth my mate and I found a copy of Quake that had been split into 80 floppy disks. We came up with a plan over IRC and I started downloading disks 1-40 and he started down from 80-41. *2* days later we had all 80 disks.

"PKZIP Archive Error. Bad CRC."

"Fuckity fuckity fuckity."

This was the days before PAR files which would clearly identify the dodgy disk. Aaah well, as it cost nowt we patiently started re downloading the archives and only 3 or 4 hours later found the dodgy disk and were able to start fragging.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 10:59, 4 replies)

Always seemed ambitious.
I can remember a version of Corel draw arriving on something mad like 150 floppies.

It was just before CD Roms arrived, mid 90s I guess.

And sods law says the CRC error only appeared at disk no 138, of course.
(username failed moderation, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 12:13, closed)

Novell netware came on something like 120 floppy disks
...and if you hadn't got up to a certain point of the installation before some driver or other crashed the installation you started right back at square one. It could take days to set one up.

I bet a lot of junior installation engineers lost their jobs once it was released on 1 CD-ROM.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 12:18, closed)

Hah.
True.

I remember when all this was fields.
(username failed moderation, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 14:59, closed)

I remember...
When all this was text fields.
(Booce, Fri 23 Mar 2012, 15:26, closed)