If I remember correctly, actual pirated copies would have been maybe tens of megabytes, since they didn't include the CD audio. But that would still have been a hefty modem download.
People were still replacing their 14.4k modems with 28.8s in 1996. I remember seeing the Quake 15 x 1.44 zips on local BBSes, which would've taken at least 3.5 hours over a perfect 14.4 connection so definitely a daunting phone line tie-up for the average kid (I had the CD.)
The common pirated version of Quake was a 20MB pre-release leak that had oodles and oodles of minor differences to the final version. All of the actual levels themselves are playable and completable. The funniest differences are a mean trap that was removed from the final E1M1, and E2M6 still begins with the eponymous oubliette, banished from official releases until 2021 (!).
Oh, but that's why you went to the computer lab of your uni - those machines were on a 10mbit LAN and had a decent connection to the internet!
Although you still wouldn't download a CD, simply because... you wouldn't have been able to take it home with you! Hard drives were in many cases smaller than a single CD. Anything more than a few 10s of MBs would have been considered excessive.
Connecting to office LANs and going on the internet was a magical feeling back then. The speed coming from a 56k dialup was jarring. We'd have network games of Quake (rocket jumps included) and watch Real Player versions of grainy South Park early episodes at er, lunch. Good times.
More than the raw speed was the fact that the error checking, buffering, and compression on dialup added anywhere from 150-400ms to your ping RTT. You could disable a lot of it, but results could be mixed depending on the quality of your lines.
you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art.
Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)
have you considered the token inefficiency of what you're doing and that you're burning electricity to re-invent the wheel? I'm being a bit of a PITA here but if everyone does what you suggest the real world implications could be staggering.
Especially if we aren't committing code back into public places for LLMs to ingest and use.
I think from an efficiency standpoint it's almost always better to use something already battle tested and used in the open than rolling your own; regardless of leveraging LLMs or not.
They have been getting replacement MiG-29s and Su-25s from allies and are starting to use f-16s from NATO nations.
"A coalition of NATO countries, primarily the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Belgium, are providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. The United States authorized the transfer and is providing training and spare parts, with deliveries having begun in 2024 to strengthen Ukraine's air force against Russia."
So yes, they still have an airforce. They're just getting re-supplied.
Also the Ukrainian airforce was ULTRA conservative about sorties to make sure they conserved as many fighters as possible.
From looking at the sources below, it looks like Ukraine still has about 1/3 of the fighter aircraft it started the war with, though it started with many non-serviceable units (seems that at least 20 aircraft were non-operational), and received many parts from abroad:
I am not sure what is meant by 'a significant number of', and I'm not sure if all commenters have a common definition of that phrase, so I'm unable to judge the veracity of the comments above.
No there are still tens of original UAF jets that by now clocked thousands of sorties. Sometimes they get shot down or otherwise lost and we get photographic evidence (tail number, sometimes even pre-war colors) that it's one of the OGs.
It works really well for "You're helpful assistant / Hi / Hello there. how may I help you today?" Anything else (esp in non-EN language) and you will see the limitations yourself. just try it.
That was pretty tough in that day and age. Especially from pirate sites.
mIRC had some good servers but getting someone to keep a direct connection with you for that long was problematic too.
And then if you didn't have a dedicated phone line for the modem...