As a teenager in this era this sort of thing was awful especially when downloading certain ahhhhh videos…

There was a program I found that really helped called NetAnt.

You see back then you could download a small file quickly, but for larger files the distant server would throttle your connection so you wouldn’t hog all their bandwidth. Enter NetAnt.

NetAnt would send several different ‘ants’ to the server and request different parts of the same file. Then it would download it in chunks and create a file when it was done. You could also queue up different urls to pull from, you just had to know the file structure of the websites content and back then that was rarely obscured and was often logical and predictable. This ended being one of my first applications of my C++ classes to solve a problem I had. I made a little program that generated strings of urls based on what I thought the file structure was and then I dumped a thousand file requests into NetAnt to download while I was in school.

It worked! And I ended up with gigs and gigs of full porn videos from one of the nastiest websites back then by scraping downloads from the sample pages of 30 second clips.

I don’t think I actually watched much of it, the acquisition was the important part.