I‘m not talking about basketball. We know how that turned out. No, I’m talking about the MPAA’s list of top 25 schools for pirating movies. UT clocked in at number 19.
I can attest that as a freshman in the fall of 1997, we were trading MP3s on the UT network before we even knew what they were exactly. My roommate had a swanky 333mhz Pentium II with 128MB of RAM while I was limping along with a 75mhz Pentium with 32MB. It still played MP3s, Quake, and the original Grand Theft Auto though. I’d loaded a Windows 98 beta on it a few months before the general release and I thought I was the shit. Active Desktop was such a great idea!!1! (actually, it was one of the few things Microsoft did that was ahead of its time… do widgets and gadgets in Mac OSX and Windows Vista look familiar?)
Netscape Communicator had just come out, and we were building web sites over Telnet with Pico. It all seems so ancient now. I realize I’m starting to sound like my parents talking about writing programs by notching tape to load into IBM mainframes.
Anyway, I can’t even imagine how much warez are available on that network now given what was available way back then.
If that makes you feel old, imagine how old *I* feel recalling using the internets for the first time in the FSU computer lab in about 1994, and then buying my first 75MHz Packard Bell computer with a 14.4k connection to Prodigy and using Webcrawler as my search engine.
We didn’t have no stinkin’ mp3’s back then, buster! You kids had it so easy.
Damn, I thought this post was going to be about football.
When I was in college, we didn’t have any Internets. We had the computer lab, equipped with several rows of 386mhz IBM machines running WordPerfect 5.0 in MS-DOS. Now that, my little friends, is what you call hardcore.
Wow, my school actually came in at #11. Pretty rare to see UC Santa Cruz and UT on the same list for anything!
When I started college we didn’t even have internet access in the dorms.
How creepy is that?
Well, shucks, I still do that. Quite extensively I might add.