I miss the walnut creek days of ftp.cdrom.com. Many an id demo and FreeBSD isos downloaded. Before that I knew of them from actually buying their CD's in the mid 90's before we had the internet.

ftp.cdrom.com was the fastest slackware mirror for me for all of my teen years.

this reminds me of poking around on my ISP's shell server to find warez drops other people had put there.

... now I can smell magic: the gathering cards for some reason.

whoops, gg guys, dinner's ready

+++ATH

I remember getting Windows 95 on the Internet, not having a browser, but having the command line FTP client built in and FTPing to cdrom.com to download a copy of Netscape so as to be able to get browsing.

Windows has and still does an excellent built-in FTP API also that was very handy. It works even on Windows 95 all the way to Windows 10.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wininet/n...

Downloading from HTTP has always been messy, specially for big files. The FTP API been always rock solid.

Edit: Apparently the Gopher API is also still available!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wininet/n...

and even has websites!

In January 2020, Veronica indexed 395 gopher servers,[16] within which it indexed approximately 4.5 million unique selectors. http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher/0/v2/vstat

I still have my copy of Walnut Creek's FreeBSD 2.2.3 distribution, a double CD set with Beastie on the front. And we had the internet back then, it was just over a 28.8 modem.

Haha me too! It was such an amazing thing for me, a 12 year old in 1994 in Mexico to actually receive the FreeBSD CDs with all the nice paraphernalia (beastie stickers and whatnot) on it. A friend of my family bought it for me because he was happy I was into computers at that age.

Memories!

There was a time where you could replace “www” for “ftp” and in most occasions there would be a file listing!

I was a maintainer of a FAQ that was posted to news.answers, which in turn was mirrored at Walnut Creek. They would send maintainers free CDs of the archive periodically. Good times.

I downloaded many Doom WADs from ftp.cdrom.com

my fingers still have muscle memory for "ftp ftp.uwasa.fi" which I think pre dated cdrom.com (for me anyways)

Showing my age. src.doc.ic.ac.uk

It was known to some at my university (or maybe just me) pronounced as "Srk Dok Ik Ak Uk".