You never used dialup did you?

300 baud. Was enough to download grainy porn pics. With a proper download tool that continues after hangups etc you can just leave it on for a week and I have when downloading software end 70s. No problem. Also via the airwaves: we had software via the radio every sunday. Works fine. Modern software is shitty large: it would be nice if a VPN provider would just release the driver and a cli which should not weigh over a mega (far less but outside mr Whitney i am not sure if that type of software dev still exists) for this type of transfer.

9600 bps dialup using the protocols commonly used back then such as ZMODEM could do file transfers at 3 MB/hour. That would be fine for grabbing VPN software.

zmodem to the rescue!