[kuschku]

A posted CD in Germany took a day to arrive (when sent from Germany, and there were people who'd send it locally), downloading the source code for a few large packages could easily take a week on dial-up.

Been there, done that.

[Symbiote]

In 1998 maybe, though 1 hour at even 48kbit/s is 20 megabytes, which is a decent-sized program's source. (The Linux kernel source in 2003 was about 25MB, compressed.)

But in 2004?

[kuschku]

What's so special about 2004? My parents finally got on DSL in 2008, but until then we — and many friends I knew — were still on dial-up. (Using the good old web.de smart surfer tool, if anyone still remembers that)

And remember, if you wanted to customize something you'd usually need not just one program's source, but also the libraries. Downloading all of Qt and most of KDE to customize something and build it from source took a loooong time.

[29083011397778]

> What's so special about 2004?

Ubuntu's first release, IIRC

[steve_rambo]

I was using dial-up up to 2008, included. It could push 10 megabytes an hour at best, and even that only late at night. An hour of dial-up was on the order of 0.05-0.1% of a typical monthly salary back then.

So even if you were willing to spend 10% of your monthly income (which is impractical, but this is an extreme example), it could buy you maybe 1-2 gigabytes of data. Or you could just, you know, order a (source or binary) CD for free or almost free.

[kuschku]

You could often get much cheaper connections, during odd hours in the middle of the night. But then you'd have to chunk the transfer over days or weeks.