In 1995 I was desperate for Desperado. I had heard they were making a big budget sequel to El Mariachi and that it was going to be wild. Quentin Tarantino was somehow involved! I wanted to see the trailer so badly but never seemed to be able to catch it on live TV. I watched entire episodes of shows I didn’t care about, just in case it appeared during the commercials, which was the only real way to see trailers in those days if you weren’t in a movie theater – except wait! WWW!

There was no streaming back then. You had to wait for a video to fully download before it could play on specialized software. Even on my blistering 28.8 dialup, the estimated download time was over six hours. But I was a determined, patient kid.

The progress bar was crawling toward 92% complete when my mom picked up the phone in the kitchen to call my aunt Marilyn and broke the connection. My devastation was considerable. There are tragedies that shape a person. This was one of mine. To this day I still don’t like my aunt Marilyn.

So I wisened up, and started the download right before bed when surely no one would be needing the phone. And no one did! Except apparently an unknown error had crashed the download at around 3%. So I waited until bedtime again to restart the download, and I woke up the next morning to find that the download was 100% complete!

But apparently I needed Quicktime to play it, a video player with a larger file size than the movie trailer I had just spend three days downloading. At this point I had invested nearly a week of my life into what was essentially a two-minute advertisement, but everything was finally in place to watch the video.

And watch it I did. Hundreds of times. It was about 1.5 inches wide by one inch tall in its native resolution. Literally postage-stamp sized. And the janky processing power of my PC made it nearly impossible to watch without random skips and pauses. Totally worth it, though.

I can’t imagine anything I would wait six hours for these days. Now I can watch a trailer instantly in 4K while standing in line for coffee and somehow feel nothing. It took me 5 seconds to copy and paste this embed code and even that seemed like too much effort.