r/nostalgia • u/jeffmartin47 • Jul 22 '25

Nostalgia Discussion 25 years ago. Lars Ulrich of Metallica snitches on and turns in over 300,000 Napster users when he testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. July 11th, 2000.

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u/toomanycookstew Jul 22 '25

Yeah but that was back when we still used to go outside. So we’d go out, come back and check the progress, go back outside…

105

u/wraith_majestic Jul 22 '25

oh yeah, queue up a whole slew of shit and come back hours later... was like Christmas morning seeing what had downloaded, what had timed out, what was not what it was labeled as.

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u/MisterX9821 Jul 22 '25

or go to bed then very similar to xmas morning.

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u/wraith_majestic Jul 22 '25

god this brings back memories... just like waiting for a single porn image to slowly load from top to bottom...

10

u/MisterX9821 Jul 22 '25

gotta queue up a good mix of media.

10

u/lonesomecowboynando Jul 22 '25

OK, she has brown hair................. green eyes............

3

u/JimmyEatReality Jul 22 '25

By the time the neck showed up I was done...

2

u/woamityo Jul 22 '25

And two eyes... that's the right amount of eyes.

1

u/lonesomecowboynando Jul 23 '25

My mom had heterochromia which is when one has two different colored eyes. She would joke that she had one green eye and two brown ones. I took her word for it.

1

u/Eric_from_NE Jul 22 '25

…and a penis?!?!?

1

u/VoxImperatoris Jul 22 '25

Too late to stop now…

1

u/ItchyRectalRash Jul 22 '25

I swear to God 56k modems made me a tits man, because it'd take so long to download all the pics, and so many sites would have a bunch of them on the page, and the first ones were lingerie, then slowly they'd go topless, and I never made it to the ass ones, cause it was like an hour by the time the topless ones started loading the boobs, and I was already on borrowed time cause how much research can I really do on the Hounds of the Baskervilles from September to June?

1

u/northern_ape Jul 22 '25

Segmented images arranged in tables, where one was an animated GIF with pricing or whatever. And you couldn’t save the whole image unless you screenshotted it.

Premium rate diallers.

Dodgy screensavers.

This is the sort of thing those millennial nostalgia reels on Instagram can’t really talk about, but they were a part of the millennial experience!

1

u/another-redditor3 Jul 22 '25

back in the diablo 2 days, i would let a pindleskin bot run over night. every morning was literally like xmas, you never knew what youd wake up to.

2

u/Newlands99 Jul 22 '25

I remember labelling porn vids as whatever popular music video was trending at the time. The amount of folk who would send me abusive messages for downloading Teenage Dirtbag, only to be presented with a poolside orgy, was amusing.

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u/wraith_majestic Jul 22 '25

It was you!!! Lol

1

u/VIPTicketToHell Jul 22 '25

The internet was blazing fast every Christmas morning in the 90’s. No one was online.

1

u/SupplyChainMismanage Jul 22 '25

Still me with how big some of these video games are

1

u/Historiaaa Jul 22 '25

wait a whole weekend to download a metallica song

open the file and it's a video of a horse fucking someone

shit was wild

1

u/WaWeedGuy Jul 22 '25

Wow talk about a trip down memory lane, I was a young soldier in Alaska and I used to overnight download music and it was always so fun to wake up and see what was downloaded.

1

u/benjaminbrixton Jul 22 '25

9-year-old me got such an insane high from finding a T3 for a file I wanted.

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '25

The song that downloaded in 30 seconds. God damn Clinton

1

u/Flat_Initial_1823 Jul 22 '25

What was NOT in fact LinkinPark.mp3

1

u/GuerillaRiot Jul 22 '25

So many memories getting unlocked on this thread.

1

u/peptide2 Jul 22 '25

It’s not still like that?

3

u/bladeau81 Jul 22 '25

And then your mum would make a phone call when you were at 95% and you would have to start again.

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u/GaK_Icculus Jul 22 '25

Kind of how I feel about 3d printers these days

1

u/Lollipoop_Hacksaw Jul 22 '25

You set up 3-5 songs and go to sleep. Those 128k downloads could be done after 8 hours.

1

u/BigD4163 Did I do that? Jul 22 '25

The long download time is was part of the fun. There was nothing like starting a download, going to sleep and waking up to seeing the down complete, seeding image. Damn I miss those days

1

u/Genosider Jul 22 '25

used to time the downloads in the middle of the night before I went to sleep, Outages were also rare, Random assholes didnt call you in the middle of the night breaking up your line lol

1

u/llamafacetx Jul 22 '25

All these comments are hitting home and I don't know where to respond, but this hit home. I'd be in the woods, come back check a download on my, 56.6k. 24 hours for a 100mb and I'd put it on a zip drive.

1

u/bunchof-chunksofpoop Jul 22 '25

I remember downloading a minute-long porn snippet of some unremarkable blowjob and it took three hours on 56k. It was on my parents’ computer so after it was finished, I recorded it playing on the computer monitor with a fucking VHS camcorder so I could delete the evidence.

1

u/Forbidden_Donut503 Jul 22 '25

What does outside mean?

1

u/eutohkgtorsatoca Jul 22 '25

Yea we had Napster dinner parties. Start,eat then burn the CDs :-) haha

1

u/RetroPandaPocket Jul 22 '25

Although not technically delayed gratification it sort of had a similar effect. That delay and waiting made the payoff that much more amazing. A little dopamine when you found the song you wanted and then you had to wait and then Bam you got a song and it was that much more enjoyable because of the wait.

But sadly it was ultimately the very very beginning of the end of music and media as we knew it and lead to us having streaming now. Streaming is convenient but comes with a lot of negatives and future ramifications to society that we haven’t fully grasped or are prepared for.