Who was using dial up 15 years ago (2009)? I grew up in a very rural area and even we got broadband by like 2003 or so. I think someone got their math wrong.
No, no it is not, an unrelated company bought the brand and logos at bankruptcy auction and started Napster 2.0, a rebrand of an unrelated music service, which was then bought by Best Buy and became Rhapsody, then THAT was sold to some tech companies and unified branded as Napster again. It has no connection other than branding to the original Napster.
“Moms”?
Had to delete my comment because I assumed that it was a typo, but it is possible that they had two mothers who both picked up the phone at the same time
landlines were shared within a single household - you could pick up the phone on the headset upstairs, and someone in the kitchen downstairs would already be talking to someone. you’d have to apologize and hang up quickly because you just intruded on their conversation. thus, two people could pick up the phone at the same time. Frankly I think that’s giving AngryMan too much credit, I’m convinced they’re just an idiot who doesn’t review before they post.
Old home landlines just had a single line for the whole house. If you picked up a phone, you could listen to and talk on whatever the conversation was.
Plenty of affairs were discovered by the wife picking up the phone to make a call while the husband was in his home office.
African-American Vernacular English (basically Black dialect) for ‘mom’. Might be dated by now?
Noun moms (plural moms)
- (African-American Vernacular) Affectionate term of address for one’s mother.
I always thought of it as a possessive noun, not plural.
But honestly i don’t know if i just made possessive noun up or not.
Your mom’s sixth divorce: the sixth divorce belonging to your mom. In this case “mom’s” is a possessive singular noun. It feels like an adjective, because it’s describing a sixth divorce, but is technically a noun.
I lived through that, I don’t know why it took 17 hours. It’d take half an hour on a bad day for an MP3 song and there wasn’t really anything else on Napster. I’ve never heard of anyone having audiobooks on there or anything, and it didn’t do movies.
Press resume after she finishes?
You know that bastard is already corrupted. When the connection is cut off dirty like that, there is no salvaging it.
Didn’t Napster have chunk checksums similar to BitTorrent? I think at least emule did.
Original Napster didn’t support resume, so if it failed you started again. Later Napster-likes supported resuming files.
Memory fails me, but I want to say that the idea of a re-download finding the end of file and resuming went back even further in history (Zmodem I think was my first exposure to it). The creation of such a miracle was game changing for the very reason OP mentions, along with other interruptions.
I don’t think people nowadays can comprehend how basic the OG Napster was. You searched for a file and every single person with a matching file would come up as a separate result. When you downloaded you downloaded only from that one person and if they cancelled it or whatever before it finished then it was gone and you had to start again. You couldn’t resume, not even from the same person with the exact same file.
my fav was bouncing people from the system (bbs) using the call-waiting blip during text-based mud PVP fights… and if you really pissed someone off they would just physically cut your phone line.
Oh man, I forgot about MUDs until reading your post. What a throwback to a simpler time. I was hooked on one that sounded like a spider - Arachnea or something.
Probably Achaea, that’s an Iron Realms game, good choice. I haven’t played a lot of MUDs but Iron Realms made the better ones that I have played. I liked Starmourn quite a lot but it seems not many other people did because it’s gone legacy mode now.
Achaea is still up and running if you want to go log in again.
Technically also, https://www.sdf.org
I was the main builder for one called Lost Prophecy. I was obsessed. I easily wrote a few novels of words for descriptions of rooms, items, mobs, and their stats and programming.
I asked the guy who ran it after it was totally dead many years ago if we could release all my work publicly for other people to enjoy on still-active MUDs. He said no. Makes me sad to this day.
That is sad, but unsurprising. MUD owners were a special breed of cat. I really enjoyed Avatar, the admin there was legendarily unapproachable.
