This is not an exaggeration. Your download speed would slow down to the point where Windows would make this kind of absurd estimate, and you’d sigh and leave the room for a while (because you couldn’t use the computer while it was doing this for fear it would crash and lose all your progress) and then you’d come back in 40 minutes and maybe it would now say 52 years or maybe it would say 3 minutes, who knew, not Windows.
Fun fact: progress bars have only very recently (as in: within the last 5 years) been any indication of the actual amount of progress being made.
The first progress bar was implemented because the computer in question (which literally took up the entire room it was in) was only capable of doing one thing at a time, and if you interrupted it to do something else, all of the previous progress was dumped into the fucking void.
So they guy trying to actually get shit done on the machine had it display a still image of a “progress bar” at about 50% over the entire screen, so people would know “oh, the computer is already busy, I should leave it alone until it’s done.” And the image disappeared when the program was finished running.Windows attempted to display actual progress but was terrible at it. This was because the progress tracking program used a really dodgy measurement system. It worked like this: if there are 100 parts to this thing, and the part we just finished took 5 minutes to do, and there are 70 parts left to do, then the rest of the parts will take 70 x 5 minutes. AND IT DID THAT FOR EACH PART IT HAD JUST FINISHED.
“Ok, the first part took 10 seconds, so obviously the rest of this will take 15ish minutes to finish.” Followed immediately by “Ok, the second part took 30 minutes, so obviously the rest of it will take two entire days to finish.”
So you had a progress estimate that whipped wildly between “this’ll take 5 more seconds” and “this’ll be done 500 years from now.”