FlashGet

» see flashget.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On a 33.6k modem a download manager was not a convenience. It was the difference between getting the file and never getting the file. The line dropped constantly, because somebody picked up the phone or the ISP decided ninety minutes was long enough, and a browser in 1999 responded to that by throwing away everything it had and offering to begin again.

FlashGet's entire reason for existing was that it refused to do that. It wrote the pieces to disk as they came in and remembered exactly where it had stopped. It also opened several connections to the same server at once, so a slow host could be persuaded to hand over more than one slice of the file at a time. On a good day that made things faster. On an ordinary Turkish dial-up evening it made things possible.

It was Chinese, written by Hou Yantang and shipped under Trend Media, and it started life in 1999 called JetCar, which is the English of the Chinese name meaning something close to internet express train. Nobody i knew called it that. It was FlashGet by the time it mattered, and it mattered a lot, because it was free in a category where the American equivalents wanted money. GetRight cost you something. FlashGet did not.

Later versions kept absorbing protocols until it handled BitTorrent and eDonkey alongside the ordinary web ones, which made it the single program you pointed at anything with a link on the end. That was the peak of its usefulness and also the beginning of its problem, because software that installs itself on every machine in a country eventually gets asked to earn its keep.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was for ~

Segmented downloading works because a single connection is usually limited by something other than your line. The server throttles per connection, or the route between you and it is congested. Open eight connections and ask each for a different byte range and you get around all of that at once, then join the pieces at the end and the file is identical to the one you would have received in an hour.

It was rude to servers and everybody knew it. Hosts started counting connections per address and refusing the ninth. That arms race is the reason download managers of the era all shipped with a configurable thread count and a forum full of people arguing over the correct number, which was the closest thing dial-up culture had to tuning a car.

~ the frozen page ~

Version 3.4, released on 4 April 2010, arrived carrying adware and a set of undisclosed Chinese applications nobody had agreed to install, with advertisements in the system tray and an installer that had stopped speaking English. The update mechanism also turned out to be insecure enough that it delivered trojans to people who had done nothing except let the program check for a new version. A download tool that cannot be trusted to download itself has run out of argument.

Version 3.7 came out on 17 May 2013 and nothing came after it. The interesting part is what flashget.com did next, which was nothing at all, for a decade. The Internet Archive's copies of the front page from January 2012 through January 2022 carry the same content hash. Ten years of annual crawls, and not one byte changed. Most abandoned software goes offline. This one stayed up and stopped moving, which is a stranger way to be dead.

~ what remains ~

The technique won completely and the program lost. Segmented, resumable transfer now sits inside your browser and inside every game launcher that survives a hotel connection, and nobody has to know it is happening or choose a thread count. A tool becomes invisible infrastructure and then there is no reason for the tool.

The name outlived the software too. flashget.com today belongs to a Hong Kong company selling screen-mirroring software and parental monitoring, with a download manager among the products, and nothing on the site connects it back to Trend Media or to 1999. Somebody found a domain with fifteen years of recognition attached and put a new business behind it. That is not a betrayal, it is just what happens to a name that a lot of people once typed and nobody is using.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »