alt Hacker Newsit would have been like 520 hours to download 500mgb. Assuming it didn't break at some point.
That was pretty tough in that day and age. Especially from pirate sites.
mIRC had some good servers but getting someone to keep a direct connection with you for that long was problematic too.
And then if you didn't have a dedicated phone line for the modem...
Replies
Oh, but that's why you went to the computer lab of your uni - those machines were on a 10mbit LAN and had a decent connection to the internet!
Although you still wouldn't download a CD, simply because... you wouldn't have been able to take it home with you! Hard drives were in many cases smaller than a single CD. Anything more than a few 10s of MBs would have been considered excessive.
According to the article: the game was 22MB and only the first 32kB of the .exe were encrypted.
If I remember correctly, actual pirated copies would have been maybe tens of megabytes, since they didn't include the CD audio. But that would still have been a hefty modem download.