[wilsynet]

To leech, leeching and to be a leecher has been around since people used to download warez. It far predates torrents.

I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.

[evandale]

That sounds like such an awesome experience. As inconvenient as it sounds sometimes I wish I grew up in the beginnings of computers.

My uncle told me a story of when he was at his first programming job carrying a box of at least 500 punch cards across a factory floor on his 2nd or 3rd day. Someone opened a garage door somewhere and a gust of wind came and blew every single punch card across the factory. They were everywhere he said. My uncle was terrified of losing his first job meanwhile these factory guys are pissing themselves laughing and almost literally rofl.

Turns out it's a prank they pull on everyone. There's only been a few that held onto the box and the cards are complete trash.

It sounds fun.

[pohl]

I've saw a prank like that on a small scale when I was a kid who liked to go play some old Trek game on a line-paper-printer-terminal — in a computer lab in a state college — that was dialed into a machine in a bigger city. Around me, meanwhile, were college students typing their programs into punch cards. I remember someone pretending to trip, spilling a stack, but then confessing that they were garbage.