[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.