GetRight

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

~ the eulogy ~

i used getright on a 33.6k modem, which is the only context in which getright makes any emotional sense at all. downloading anything large in turkey in the late nineties meant sitting on a phone line that could drop for any reason, and when it dropped at ninety percent you did not want to start the file over from zero. getright is what saved you from that. it held the download and picked it back up from where the line had died.

it came out in february 1997, written by michael burford under the name headlight software. the thing it introduced, resuming a broken download, was new enough that the software sites did not even have a category to file it under yet. there was no such thing as a download manager because getright was more or less inventing the idea. you pointed it at a file, it broke the file into pieces, and if the connection died it knew exactly which pieces it already had.

for a certain kind of user this was not optional software. if you were pulling mp3s and installers over dial-up, and half the point of the internet cafe and the home modem was pulling mp3s and installers, you ran getright or something like it. it sat in the background and made a slow, unreliable line survivable. i did not think of it as a program i loved. it was more like a seatbelt, the thing you only noticed when the connection dropped and it caught you.

~ the dossier ~

~ the actual end ~

getright did not get shut down. nothing announced its death and no server went dark. the last version, 6.5, shipped on 24 january 2011 and then nothing came after it. by then broadband had quietly removed the entire reason it existed. when your connection does not drop and a large file finishes in seconds, resuming a broken download is a solved problem you never have to think about.

~ the long tail ~

the site is technically still there, a page frozen around 2011 offering a program almost nobody needs now. that is a specific kind of death, the software that did not fail so much as get made pointless by the thing it ran on getting better. getright solved the exact problem of the dial-up decade, and then the dial-up decade ended. i have not resumed a broken download in fifteen years. i did not notice when i stopped.

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