Finding that piece of software around 2001-2002 was what allowed me to finally download a specific piece of, ahem, 'shareware', that was about 400 MB, zipped, that I would never have been able to finish on a 14.4kbps modem on a single very noisy phone line that usually dropped the call every 2 hours or so. It eventually took three days but the file came across uncorrupted. It wouldn't have been possible without the ability to resume downloads after dropped connections.
And that software download went on to allow me to start the path learning what I wanted to learn about, and that paved the way for my engineering degrees and thus setting me up for the last 20-some years. Wild how little pieces of the puzzle like that drive so much of your life.
(also a great app to download everything you wanted from a site, regex selections, etc.)
Makes several connections and downloads chunks in parallel, for some sites with limited upload (their, your download) speeds per session it really speeds up the downloads.
Sadly, not much development recently (9 months ago was the last commit)
That’s because BitTorrent was immediately useful and empowering.
Edit: Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol#Technic...
1. You connect to servers A and B.
2. Tell B to receive a PASV transfer. It replies with the IP address and port it's receiving on.
3. Tell A to send to that address and port.
This is documented in RFC 959, starting with
"In another situation a user might wish to transfer files between two hosts, neither of which is a local host."i used to use that feature to run several downloads from several different sites of different sections of linux distro isos when new releases were put up