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I was at college during this time. My roommate was downloading various Linux distributions and the campus IT department came to our room asking why we were using so much bandwidth and to please stop.

I don’t recall Napster.com being an issue but P2P sharing sites (limewire etc) was definitely huge. And even bigger, was people setting up local file shares to allow fellow classmates to download files off your desktop.

I think our entire campus ran off of a T3 line (45 Mbps) which was stupid fast back in the day to connect to public internet.

Off topic: what ever happened to “Internet2”. There was a ton of talk about this back around this time.




This was just a bit before my time, but I was in early HS. I still remember being curious and looking up what it would cost to have a single T3 line installed, and it was tens of thousands of dollars.


You’re not alone. I did the same and recall the cost being similar to what you mentioned.

Also brings back memories of movies like Swordfish that made being into computers cool, even though in hindsight these movies were super cheesy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film)




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