FlashGet (1999 - 2013)

1999 - 2013

dead asia

before broadband made downloading boring, a file that failed at ninety four percent was simply gone and you began again from zero. flashget opened several connections to the same server at once and stitched the slices back together, and more importantly it wrote them to disk as they arrived, so a dead line cost you a minute instead of an evening. it came out of china in 1999 under the name jetcar and ended up installed on an enormous number of windows machines. its last years were spent bundling things nobody had asked for, the final version shipped on 17 may 2013, and the homepage then sat byte for byte unchanged for the next ten years.

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

~ the goodbye ~

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still, on a 33.6k modem a download manager was not a convenience. anyway. in fairness, it was the difference between getting the file and never getting the file. The line dropped constantly, because somebody picked up the phone or the ISP decided ninety minutes was long enough. a browser in 1999 responded to that by throwing away everything it had and offering to begin again.

this is mostly told from the outside, flashGet's entire reason for existing was that it refused to do that. It wrote the pieces to disk as they came in and remembered exactly where it had stopped. It also opened several connections to the same server at once (roughly). anyway. a slow host could be persuaded to hand over more than one slice of the file at a time. for whatever reason. On a good day that made things faster, on an ordinary Turkish dial-up evening it made things possible.

It was Chinese, written by Hou Yantang and shipped under Trend Media. really though, it started life in 1999 called JetCar, which is the English of the Chinese name meaning something close to internet express train. Nobody i knew called it that. It was FlashGet by the time it mattered. it mattered a lot, because it was free in a category where the American equivalents wanted money. GetRight cost you something, flashGet did not.

Later versions kept absorbing protocols until it handled BitTorrent and eDonkey alongside the ordinary web ones, which made it the single program you pointed at anything with a link on the end. That was the peak of its usefulness and also the beginning of its problem, because software that installs itself on every machine in a country eventually gets asked to earn its keep.

~ the chronicle ~

Born	1999, in China, released as JetCar
Peak	a default install on Chinese Windows machines through the 2000s
Killed	17 may 2013, the last release
Lifespan	fourteen years
Made by	Hou Yantang, under Trend Media
Killed by	broadband, and an adware habit that outlived the product

~ what it was for ~

Segmented downloading works because a single connection is usually limited by something other than your line. The server throttles per connection, or the route between you and it is congested. Open eight connections and ask each for a different byte range and you get around all of that at once (or whatever it was called). join the pieces at the end and the file is identical to the one you would have received in an hour.

It was rude to servers and everybody knew it, hosts started counting connections per address and refusing the ninth. That arms race is the reason download managers of the era all shipped with a configurable thread count and a forum full of people arguing over the correct number, which was the closest thing dial-up culture had to tuning a car.

~ the frozen page ~

this part i was not really around for, but anyway. Version 3.4, released on 4 April '10, arrived carrying adware and a set of undisclosed Chinese applications nobody had agreed to install, with advertisements in the system tray and an installer that had stopped speaking English. The update mechanism also turned out to be insecure enough that it delivered trojans to people who had done nothing except let the program check for a new version (close enough). still, a download tool that cannot be trusted to download itself has run outta argument (or whatever it was called).

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. more or less. Version 3.7 came out on 17 May 2013 and nothing came after it.

The Internet Archive's copies of the front page from January 2012 through January 2022 carry the same content hash (name escapes me). The interesting part is what flashget.com did next, which was nothing at all, for a decade. look, ten years of annual crawls, and not one byte changed, most abandoned software goes offline. This one stayed up and stopped moving, which is a stranger way to be dead (close enough).

~ what remains ~

this is mostly told from the outside, the technique won completely and the program lost. Segmented, resumable transfer now sits inside your browser and inside every game launcher that survives a hotel connection. to be honest. nobody has to know it is happening or choose a thread count. for whatever reason. A tool becomes invisible infrastructure and then there is no reason for the tool.

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