And it'll outlive me.
Distribution happened lots of ways. A BBS might trade files with a friendly BBS somewhere else. Some people collected them like Pokemon and traded them. Having something valuable that others wanted was a currency. Maybe I sent you my G-File collection and you sent me Dr J vs Larry Bird.
Eventually these files diffused all over the planet and wound up in collections on the internet and CD-ROMs at hamfests. They will spring up in the most unlikely of places.
It's fun to look back on it now, but it wasn't always wonderful. Calling BBSes could get expensive, transmitting files tied up your system for an entire night (no multitasking!) for something that took up less space than a Facebook tracking cookie. The hardware and bandwidth I'm using now would have been incomprehensible back then.
Mine and many others were distributed on file sharing sites called AE Servers. And yes, BBSs, too.
Some of the more popular files were the ones typed up from The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and peoples’ variations on those (bomb making, lock picking, etc). I never knew that was a real book until many years later.
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS),[1] is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.[2]
Not just HW and bandwidth, it's the software too.
File transfers were probably done via the XModem protocol, which did error checking only via a weak checksum, not even a CRC. Over a large file, the chances of corruption somewhere were dismaying.
And these here were text files, which should be hugely compressible. But at this point in history, compression algorithms were still in their infancy. I don't recall encountering ARC until the late 80s. So you'd be transmitting rather more than you needed to in the first place.
Those of us with Apple ]['s and Novation Apple Cat's could chat while transferring files.
also, memory dumpers that can rebase an exe from memory given the original entry point
