That's right AOL. Don't believe me? Here's how it worked. Anyone who grew up on AOL knows what I'm talking about.
Each AOL account could have up to five screen names. Each screen name could have up to 550 e-mails* in their Inbox. Each e-mail could have a maximum file attachment of 15MB.
So...15MB times 550 is 8GB times 5 is about 40GB. That's per account, and thanks to the various account generation/phishing tricks, it wasn't uncommon to have several AOL accounts at any one time.
What did this mean? Well, it meant that AOL became one of the biggest warez havens in the blossoming Internet. And all with point and click easy, none of the file decoding nonsense of USENET.
How did AOL do this? I have no idea...but there were entire groups of people uploading warez non-stop so they could forward the mails around. At some point AOL cracked wise and started nuking attachments that had been downloaded X times. But for many years, it was glorious. Imagine sending several GB of software to someone with a single click of a button.
* actually you could have 550 in both Inbox, Outbox, and Read mail and various AOL tools helped you do this, bringing your capacity to a whopping 120GB.
So...15MB times 550 is 8GB times 5 is about 40GB. That's per account, and thanks to the various account generation/phishing tricks, it wasn't uncommon to have several AOL accounts at any one time.
So that explains why warez releases are always broken up into 15MB RAR or ZIP files.
Not AOL, but Usenet. Many (If not all) Usenet providers have a size limit on messages (even if it is a binary) and not all pieces get through to begin with, so files become a web of pieces.
A bunch of Messages make up a rar. A bunch of rars make up a file. And if you are missing any, pars and par2s replace what you are missing.
Yeah, but that's a separate limit -- what you'll usually see with a large archive on Usenet is several.rar segments, with each of those segments, in turn, split across several articles.
The 15MB size really is common for those.rar segments, and this really might explain it. I'd wondered about it myself.
No, actually warez of this era used 1.4MB floppy-sized pieces. AOL'ers would repack multiple pieces into AOL-sized 15MB attachements. It was a tad sloppy, since the original releases were often ZIP files that had been RAR'd, so you would sometimes need to unarchive three or four levels just to get the original release.
Group releases were divided into 1.4MB floppy sized pieces probably because every archival program could make floppy-sized pieces. It was a convenient way to disassemble a large program an
Ahh, I remember those days. Especially the month(!) it took to download a movie on dialup =)
The reason it worked, I think, is because AOL only kept 1 copy of the attachment. So you might have 40GB in your inbox and forward it to 1000 people creating 40TB of messages, but it's still be the single 40GB shared among everyone.
Yes, obviously forwarding didn't necessitate extra copies, but it still was 40GB of information that had been uploaded and stored somewhere. Forwarding kept those files alive while uploading continued. For a brief time AOL groups were keeping track of files in their group inboxes and the arguments were about TB.
See AOL had broadband connectivity right around the same time as all this was going on so people could connect from college networks and do most of the uploading on those speedy T3's.
I didn't have aol very much but a lot of people I knew did and I had heard about the rampant warez trading. I remember once being at a friend's house who had AOL and I wanted to mess around with it, we joined a couple of chat rooms and stuff, and I was like, I wonder if there's a huge private chatroom called "warez"? So I typed in warez and tried to join a chat, and was in the room for all of 2 seconds before I was kicked out of the room and the computer disconnected. When my friend went to reconnect it
"I've seen the forgeries I've sent out."
-- John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US), about forging net news articles
Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994! (Score:5, Interesting)
Each AOL account could have up to five screen names. Each screen name could have up to 550 e-mails* in their Inbox. Each e-mail could have a maximum file attachment of 15MB.
So...15MB times 550 is 8GB times 5 is about 40GB. That's per account, and thanks to the various account generation/phishing tricks, it wasn't uncommon to have several AOL accounts at any one time.
What did this mean? Well, it meant that AOL became one of the biggest warez havens in the blossoming Internet. And all with point and click easy, none of the file decoding nonsense of USENET.
How did AOL do this? I have no idea...but there were entire groups of people uploading warez non-stop so they could forward the mails around. At some point AOL cracked wise and started nuking attachments that had been downloaded X times. But for many years, it was glorious. Imagine sending several GB of software to someone with a single click of a button.
* actually you could have 550 in both Inbox, Outbox, and Read mail and various AOL tools helped you do this, bringing your capacity to a whopping 120GB.
- JoeShmoe
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Re:Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994! (Score:2, Interesting)
So that explains why warez releases are always broken up into 15MB RAR or ZIP files.
Re:Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994! (Score:2)
Many (If not all) Usenet providers have a size limit on messages (even if it is a binary) and not all pieces get through to begin with, so files become a web of pieces.
A bunch of Messages make up a rar.
A bunch of rars make up a file.
And if you are missing any, pars and par2s replace what you are missing.
Re:Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994! (Score:2)
The 15MB size really is common for those
Re:Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994! (Score:2)
Group releases were divided into 1.4MB floppy sized pieces probably because every archival program could make floppy-sized pieces. It was a convenient way to disassemble a large program an
Re:Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994! (Score:2)
The reason it worked, I think, is because AOL only kept 1 copy of the attachment. So you might have 40GB in your inbox and forward it to 1000 people creating 40TB of messages, but it's still be the single 40GB shared among everyone.
Re:Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994! (Score:2)
See AOL had broadband connectivity right around the same time as all this was going on so people could connect from college networks and do most of the uploading on those speedy T3's.
In fact, a l
Re:Pfffft! AOL had 40GB e-mail storage...in 1994! (Score:3, Funny)