That one week in 1995 when I discovered FTP shareware sites

I remember this one week back in the summer of 1995 where I stumbled onto a FTP site at ftp.cdrom.com that had just about every shareware game you could imagine. I was stuck using my dad's 14.4k modem, so downloading a single 2MB file like Doom shareware took about 45 minutes. But man, the thrill of browsing those directories and finding weird stuff like Lode Runner clones or obscure puzzle games was unreal. The best part was that nobody cared about download limits back then, so I just let my modem run all night grabbing WAD files. Has anyone else ever spent an entire weekend just hunting through random FTP servers for games that ended up being total junk?

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foster.ruby8h ago

I remember ftp.cdrom.com, that was the big one for sure. I found a Quake deathmatch config there that took three hours to download and crashed my computer the second I tried to run it. The hunt was always way more exciting than the actual payoff half the time.