Practicalmadness

Another old memory dredged up by an evening of P2P and Dr. Pepper: before there was such a thing as Gnutella, or even Napster, there was Usenet. Yup, as in newsgroups.

I remember acquiring a pirated copy of Photoshop from the internet -- using a dialup modem, no less -- by going to one of the alt.binaries groups and running Combine and Decode. It took hours, usually overnight, but it worked...sometimes.

The hit-or-miss of trying to use a filesharing client like Acquisition is a dreamlike convenience compared to the old way.