Your first torrent

[BeardFaceMan]

Fuck it, lets get all nostalgic (well, as much as you can when discussing internet things). When did torrents first enter your life? I think mininova was the one of the first sites I used regularly, cant remember the name of the program I used (bitcomet?) but you had the program open for every torrent you were downloading. First video I downloaded was the the first episode of season 2 of 24, would get up for work in the morning and set the torrent running so it would have downloaded by the time I got home. They were satellite intercepts too so I was getting them the day before they aired in the US. And advert free! Fuck me, I couldnt believe my eyes when I realised someone had lovingly cut all the adverts out (or in the case of intercepts, not put in at all).

So how did you break your torrent cherry? To go from aimlessly searching for stuff on the likes of Kazaa or Shareaza to browsing websites that had everything in nice categories for you was fantastic.

[bgmnts]

I remember downloading that porno of that dude banging the girl in the shower on Limewire back in the day.

[Blumf]

Hum... probably the Slackware 9.0 ISOs.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I didn't get in to torrenting until 2007 when I was bed bound with the broken leg, but the first thing I obtained was all of The Larry Sanders Show. Took about a week to get a season as I was only allowed to download at night, but I cherished every episode an enormous amount.

[Malcy]

Too long ago to be sure but I've used Demonoid the longest. Signed up for it to get the pre-air leak of the first RTD era Doctor Who.

I think I might have been using it for Enterprise a couple of years before that though.

[Bhazor]

I was pretty late into getting torrents. By then I already had a porn subscription, access to cheap DVDs and not much interest in music or movies. So the first thing I downloaded was a Snes rom pack about 4 years ago when a big emulation site purge came in.  The entire Snes library downloaded in 20 minutes. What a time to be alive.

[itsfredtitmus]

i downloaded pimp my ride season 1 to test the waters

[mothman]

2003 I think. I'd not been watching Star Trek Enterprise at all, really, but then got interested in watching the Xindi arc (season 3) so started downloading. And also the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. And then I wondered if you could torrent porn, and discovered Empornium, and haven't looked back.

[Isnt Anything]

Adam & Joe's Fourmative Years from UKNova which i signed up to especially to get after someone recommended it to me and pointed me to that site. this was quite late maybe 2004 2005 ?

i then got so distracted by everything else on offer there that although i did torrent it, i never did get round to watching it .... !

before that though i had briefly done Kazaa and then eMule. lots and lots of eMule ....

never limewire though. give me some credit.

oh and a tiny bit of soulseek later on

[newbridge]

Kazaa/eMule/Limewire were P2P (shout out to WinMX!)

I don't remember my first torrent specifically, but I do fondly remember trying to collect all the MST3K episodes back when there was no other way to see most of them (now they're probably all on YouTube). Amazingly it was mostly on myspleen, which is apparently still around.

[Barry Admin]

I might have encoded that Fourmative Years.

[Barry Admin]

Suprnova was the biggest one wasn't it, I loved it. Probably downloaded Prison Break first. Already had Seinfeld from IRC and Emule. Tons of Howard Stern stuff I had missed on usenet.

[BeardFaceMan]

Suprnova was the biggest one wasn't it, I loved it. Probably downloaded Prison Break first. Already had Seinfeld from IRC and Emule. Tons of Howard Stern stuff I had missed on usenet.

Ah yes, Supernova, not mininova. I was never an A&J guy but I've still got your Clinton His Struggle With Dirt encode here, never seen a copy of that anywhere else. UKNova was fucking fantastic wasnt it? I've still got a vhs player under my bed from when I used to encode loads of stuff, it really was amazing the stuff people had tucked away on video.

Slight tangent, but do you think with broadband and streaming and files and hard drive sizes these days that tv shows and films are come by too easily and you dont appreciate them, or sometimes even enjoy them, as much? now you can just queue up whole seasons or boxsets and get pretty much anything you like instantly. There was a certain thrill of the chase trying to hunt down rarities, or even just stuff you hadnt seen for a while and never expected to again, I think I appreciated the shows more when I could only download the odd episode floating about instead of just going to the pirate bay and downloading the lot.

[madhair60]

I might have encoded that Fourmative Years.

Yeah but you won't fucking reseed it will you? :p

[Beagle 2]

Suprnova was the biggest one wasn't it, I loved it. Probably downloaded Prison Break first. Already had Seinfeld from IRC and Emule. Tons of Howard Stern stuff I had missed on usenet.

I actually remember you replying to somebody who had started a thread about how depressed they were with a comment along the lines of "for god's sake download something from here" and linking to surprnova, and that's how I found it for the first time. I think the first thing I downloaded was The Terminal to test it out. It worked. Not as a piece of art, but it worked.

[Hemulen]

I believe it was Monty Python's Flying Circus series 1, which I think wasn't out on DVD at the time. Either that or I just couldn't afford it... It was a delight to finally see full shows with everything in context after a childhood subsisting on VHS compilations, transcripts on fan sites and a copy of "And Now For Something Completely Different" taped off the telly.

After that it was straight onto UKnova, hoarding all kinds of obscure gems and before-my-time classics - all now gone because I was a foolish young man who had to learn about backing up the hard way.

[maett]

Pretty sure it was Japanese porn and more than  likely Akira Fubuki in early 2000s, me house mate explained what Kazaa was and allowed me to search and download a couple of clips. I very soon bought my own computer!

[bgmnts]

By then I already had a porn subscription

Never known anyone to have that.

[Bhazor]

You'll wish you had one when April rolls  around mate. Have fun giving personal details to thinly veiled sex trafficking sites.

[DukeDeMondo]

Slight tangent, but do you think with broadband and streaming and files and hard drive sizes these days that tv shows and films are come by too easily and you dont appreciate them, or sometimes even enjoy them, as much? now you can just queue up whole seasons or boxsets and get pretty much anything you like instantly. There was a certain thrill of the chase trying to hunt down rarities, or even just stuff you hadnt seen for a while and never expected to again, I think I appreciated the shows more when I could only download the odd episode floating about instead of just going to the pirate bay and downloading the lot.

Yeah, I think there's something in that, definitely. When you could only get hold of the odd track or two you absolutely appreciated them more than you do when you're getting them as part of a huge DISCOGRAPHY 1956-1998 bastard of a thing that's with you five minutes after you first heard tell of the artist in question. I only really get the thrill of having found something I really wanted to see or hear and only really feel like I'm getting the good of it when it's something I've had to hunt down and spend hours downloading in bits from wherever and then scavenge about for subtitles and all this kind of carrying on. I appreciate those things, however shit they end up being, more than I do the Best Thing In The World that I downloaded there a minute ago in the time it took to change my socks and pants.

Similar to how I might've spent years waiting for a DVD release of something - Ghostwatch, for example - and would have watched it endlessly when I finally got my hands on it, but now I might see that it's been uploaded to YouTube and I'll bookmark the page and maybe download the video and then I'll forget all about it. There are exceptions. It was a big, big deal for me when the pilot for Shane MacGowan's chat show was uploaded to YouTube a couple years ago, but it's rare I'll get as excited as that about something being uncovered or made available any more. Happens, but not that frequently.

Also, choice fatigue and all of that.

Anyway I think the first things I torrented were Battle Royale 2 and a CAM copy of The Passion Of The Christ. Around 2004, then, that must've been.

[mothman]

I liked Napster until it got hamstrung, then switched to WinMX. I quite liked being able to browse what other users had on offer, found older songs I'd never have thought of looking for.

[Malcy]

I liked Napster until it got hamstrung, then switched to WinMX. I quite liked being able to browse what other users had on offer, found older songs I'd never have thought of looking for.

WinMX was great. I still have a load of stuff i got from there.

[Twed]

Torrents, people. We're talking about torrents.

Not sure what mine was. I think it might have been something from Demonoid...

[asids]

An episode of 24 for my mum, I think. Can't remember torrenting before that.

[Alberon]

Too long ago to be sure but I've used Demonoid the longest. Signed up for it to get the pre-air leak of the first RTD era Doctor Who.

I think I might have been using it for Enterprise a couple of years before that though.

I got both myself. I remember trying, and largely failing, to sleep while my computer in the corner of the room achingly slowly downloaded the leaked Doctor Who first episode back in 2005. Partly because of a noisy fan in the PC, but mostly because of the noisy fan in my head buzzing about seeing a brand new episode of Doctor Who after so many years.

I did download Enterprise episodes, but at least initially I was getting them off of IRC groups rather than from torrents and I was using Napster back in the dial-up dark ages before broadband was available in my area, but beyond all those memories I've actually no idea when I first moved to proper torrents.

[Icehaven]

When I saw a random episode of Mad Men on TV (was one from about 2/3rds through the first season), fell in love and had to find what I'd missed immediately. Would have been 2009-2010. I believe I came on CAB to find out how to do it as I had no idea. Must have been 2010 then as I didn't join til then.

[kngen]

Akira Fubuki

Ooooh, she was lovely.

[mothman]

WinMX was great. I still have a load of stuff i got from there.

Me too! Great fun. Many happy memories. The rabid Yank who refused to share something with me, a non-Yank, mere days after 9/11... I was a terrible WinMXer, though, I used to have one folder visible on ths system - where I downloaded stuff to - then move it out of there as soon as it was complete. Frightly infra dig, I admit.

[Dannyhood91]

De La Soul - De La Soul is Dead.

Those were halcyon days.

[Malcy]

I got both myself. I remember trying, and largely failing, to sleep while my computer in the corner of the room achingly slowly downloaded the leaked Doctor Who first episode back in 2005. Partly because of a noisy fan in the PC, but mostly because of the noisy fan in my head buzzing about seeing a brand new episode of Doctor Who after so many years.

I finally got it around 4am and watched it 3 times. Took hours and hours to download. I think that may have been why I started using torrents. I could hit the top speed I could get with them and it was easier to get stuff. Would never again have to try download a large file without the reset every two hours cutting it off as well.