Around the turn of the century my family went from dialup to cable. It felt like a waste to not use all the bandwidth all the time. I had a surplus server run

Around the turn of the century my family went from dialup to cable. It felt like a waste to not use all the bandwidth all the time. I had a surplus server running Windows 2000 and Kazaa, Limewire, and maybe more. I think I missed Napster. That was a completely normal thing among all my IT literate friends. My rig was kinda anemic. A buddy of mine had four 250gb hard drives. A whole ~terabyte~ of storage. And a liquid cooled AMD. I put a mod chip in my Xbox and brought it to school where we watched (pirated) Monty Python in English class. All this to say it was normalized in the US. I don't think it is stigmatized even today. More like we had about a decade of streaming services actually providing good value. But now the product managers and UX designers have their hooks so deep in it that it's becoming unusable.