Anyone remember DAP, Download Accelerator Plus? The colorful bars were nice. A part of my childhood, downloading shareware Windows games through dial-up.

Download Accelerator Plus... wow what a memory.

Finding that piece of software around 2001-2002 was what allowed me to finally download a specific piece of, ahem, 'shareware', that was about 400 MB, zipped, that I would never have been able to finish on a 14.4kbps modem on a single very noisy phone line that usually dropped the call every 2 hours or so. It eventually took three days but the file came across uncorrupted. It wouldn't have been possible without the ability to resume downloads after dropped connections.

And that software download went on to allow me to start the path learning what I wanted to learn about, and that paved the way for my engineering degrees and thus setting me up for the last 20-some years. Wild how little pieces of the puzzle like that drive so much of your life.

Some apps still do the same, eg:

https://www.downthemall.net/

(also a great app to download everything you wanted from a site, regex selections, etc.)

Makes several connections and downloads chunks in parallel, for some sites with limited upload (their, your download) speeds per session it really speeds up the downloads.

Sadly, not much development recently (9 months ago was the last commit)

Wow, that's a throwback.

Download The Mall!

I remember that...

Getright!

The trouble is those special tools also needed downloading. So I could either sacrifice an evening's, ahem, download, or just chance it yet again. I eventually got an FTP client and it was like a superpower. BitTorrent was honestly more impressive to me than AI. Ah, the good old days.

> BitTorrent was honestly more impressive to me than AI. Ah, the good old days.

That’s because BitTorrent was immediately useful and empowering.

The server that has moved countless Petabytes is glFTPd that allows FXP ( clients without bandwidth can initiate to transfer files from server to server ).

That’s a built-in feature of FTP that doesn’t require server support.

Edit: Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol#Technic...

1. You connect to servers A and B.

2. Tell B to receive a PASV transfer. It replies with the IP address and port it's receiving on.

3. Tell A to send to that address and port.

This is documented in RFC 959, starting with

  "In another situation a user might wish to transfer files between two hosts, neither of which is a local host."

In the BBS days there were transfer programs that allowed for interrupted downloads to be resumed:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HS/Link

wget will pick up a dl where it left off. i know that "pick up where you left off" capability has been built into HTTP since the mid '90s if not right from scratch

i used to use that feature to run several downloads from several different sites of different sections of linux distro isos when new releases were put up