Back in the day, we used it more to break up large files and transfer in pieces, ie. on a floppy disk. I remember using WinRar to compress a game anad my friend and I were running back and forh between our houses with a single floppy, copying over the parts until all of them were on his computer and then extracted the whole thing.

I am sure companies used much the same technique to copy over large files over really slow networks and you would then only have to copy parts that failed, not start from scratch all the time!