Comic Strips

Funny how they say how long it would take to download the ISO. Back then sneakernet was our preferred means of sailing the highs seas. In the before before times this meant going to a mate (or a mate of a mate of a dude who used to live next door to my cousin) with a stack of floppies and copying over everything you needed. Later when floppies got cheap, so you would ask for stuff and through multiple friends of friends you'd get a floppy handed over. Put it in your pocket and then run home to try out the new goods.

Later CD burning at home became a thing and CDs were already cheap. You'd show up at some dudes place, he'd have a bunch of CD spindles setup and machines for copying stuff. You'd give some of the software you had for him to copy and receive a bunch of CDs back. They usually had three kinds of CDs, the super premium ones he'd use for a master copy. The nice ones reserved for good folk and the spindles of the crappy ones which were good enough for most things. It was always a trade off between cost and quality, where crappy quality could mean failed burns which wasted time. Some people had special rigs setup for multiple copying at the same time, but the evil buffer underflow error was always lurking in the background.