I remember warez being the sole driver of my modem upgrade path from 9600 to 14,400 to 28,800, finally to very unstable 33,600 bps, then to trying to convince my parents to order a second phone line for... uh... modem... stuff... And then, suddenly it was off to undergrad where, lo and behold there were these two weird looking "RJ45 jacks" in each dorm room, and I soon realized I'd never have to worry about modem speed again...
I still remember the day, circa 1997, that I found an anonymous-enabled FTP site on a uunet domain that had been used as a drop site by various couriers, and let me tell you, this high schooler's 540MB hard drive was not large enough.
I'm always a little surprised when I don't see mentions of FSP [1] in works like this. For a short time, it seemed to be the warez transfer means of choice for those looking to fly under the radar and avoid detection. (So I'm told.) But maybe it wasn't much more than a footnote in the grand scheme of things.
This is dense. I skimmed through hoping to see examples of the “aesthetics” with screenshots of old school installers (like the ones from Razor 1911, Class, Deviance etc) - it looks like these are scattered around the web, though. If anyone wants to relive some of the old chiptunes from these installers there’s https://archive.org/details/codex-installer-music-5-2018-03-...
Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633143 - Dec 2021 (13 comments)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Service_Protocol
The .nfo files alone, distributed with most releases, carrying the most elaborate of ASCII art. I distinctly remember the aesthetics you mention.