For those that don’t know what the sneakernet is it’s essentially transferring data through physical means. For example I would occasionally download TV shows to a hard drive for a friend who didn’t have access to the internet after they thought they cancelled their subscription to their ISP and acquired hundreds of dollars of debt. You can find a Wikipedia page for the term sneakernet here.
Have any of you set something up with your neighbors or family? I’d include LAN setups where content as shared as part of the sneakernet. Kind of similar to how stuff has been distributed in Cuba.
You know, there was a much shorter range version of this that was predominantly used in offices and college computer rooms. It was called FrisbeeNet.
back in the dial-up and bbs days, i kept plenty of floppy disks (and later CDs) with my favorite media on them to play when i visited friends. in more recent history i have placed my digital media backups on drives to play at friends’ houses. it’s nice to be offline now and then.
while not technically sneakernet, we did have a piratebox set up at an office that i leased for backing up media collectively.
well I setup a sneakernet script for my parents as they live in a deadzone and only got shitty celluar. I lived a few hours away so my script would grab the movies and shows for the past few months in its search and cp them to my disk. then i would run another script once i get to their place to upload it to windows and put it in the right folder. subsequent iterations the scripts were changed to shell script and python. their computer now runs Debian too. works great.
I just shipped n 8TB drive of children’s shows to a friend. First, because many of the shows I wanted to recommend him aren’t on streaming services and second, because he’s moving to the mountains soon, where the internet may or may not be available.
Other than this instance, the last time was likely around 2007.
I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a whole pirate video game ring going around our school that worked this way! Someone would buy a game, and everyone would bring in their blank floppies and it would get distributed around the computer lab. Also a separate ring of banned VHS movies taped off Swedish TV for some reason.
We used to play Halo CE and Minecraft at school with copies saved on thumb drives. Before that I installed Zoo Tycoon on one of the computers in my elementary school library.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down a highway.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83.
That was a saying in the 80s already, and still relevant today.
Damn it. Beat me to it. I’ll be first ext time.
My dad used to occasionally get DVDs from a friend at work. Still have a shitton of them in the basement. Now my dad judges me for pirating but I’m like you did the same thing!
Shiiiiiiiit, transferring stuff via physical media takes me back to high school. It was mostly porn videos to my friends, never charged a dime, only asked them to give me a blank CD
Haven’t done anything like that since I finished college. During those years, it was mostly sharing ripped versions of games that we could play straight from the USB stick on the college computers, mostly Counter Strike 1.6 , much to my distaste as I much preferred other games like Digital Paintball 2 and Age of Empires 2. Also a bit ironic that, despite all of us being CompSci students, I seemed to be the only one who was willing to endure the “pains” of setting up a SNES emulator so we could play Bomberman over the LAN.
In high school I used to pass USB flash drives in an Altoid can (to protect it), good times.
I also used to be the CD-R guy (and later DVD+RW) for my group of friends, I was really into
.cuesheets and putting hidden tracks on those (including dumb shit like seeking back in the middle of a slow song would reveal heavy metal or something).These days I host a Tailscale network — unfortunately with residential upload speeds being trash, I’ve moved all my Blu-ray rips to Storj and set up a WebDAV gateway on a VPS (running Tailscale). It’s fast as hell but I’m not in love with decrypting on the VPS.
I’m old enough to remember when “sneakernet” meant 3.5" floppies, and was a pretty legit solution versus 2400 baud modems…
Yup 5-6 floppies and if one failed you could try to go back and copy one, but usually had to start over.
I got the Mac copy of Photoshop 4 from my high school this way with .sit files. It was like second to last floppy that failed (probably an ok AOL disk) and I had to go back the next day and copy it again. But it worked!
Not long after that a friend of mine got a ZIP drive, but it wasn’t SCSI, so it didn’t work with my computer. I didn’t get one until college (essential for a graphic designer in the late 90s).
Right there with you!
My first experience with the internet was Gopher.
Sneakernet is OK, but I still prefer IPoAC.
Ah you beat me to it
That was exactly what I thought it was. Classic! And an official RFC (although introduced on April 1).
I send my mom a USB flash drive with photos periodically because it’s easier than getting her to use Google photos and I don’t have to manage more social media garbage.
I’m a teacher and I have a USB stick full of textbook PDFs. It wouldn’t be cool to email them on my professional account but sneakernet is the ultimate VPN lol
My wife does this in the dental industry. She’s got loads of questionable quality USB sticks and I haven’t gotten her to copy it all to our NAS.
Isn’t that the plot to Mirror’s Edge?
I transfer shows and movies to people I work with via external hard drive all the time. When I was a kid we’d copy pc games and CDs we got and share them around.
Your example trails off into a non-example.