It was the late 90s, and I remember going to a LAN party in a guy's garage where we all played various games, swapped pirated software, and second most importan

It was the late 90s, and I remember going to a LAN party in a guy's garage where we all played various games, swapped pirated software, and second most importantly of all, an absolutely terrible VCD pirated copy of the theatrical release of the Matrix that somebody copied off of a PC that came into the repair store they worked at. One guy realized we could hook the whole ensemble up to a dial-up ISP connection and he could share his connection out to all of us with network gear and we suddenly could access the internet...sorta...very slow and highly unreliable. When we finally got it sort of working, a few of us all joined demoscene and gaming IRC channels and tried to sorta build a "meta" LAN party across the globe with everybody at their own local party all coordinated and joked around in the shared chat. We'd send somebody off every few hours for a pizza run, and it being autumn, got pretty chilly by around 2-3am. Lots of caffeine, soda, coffee, and most importantly community and fun. Days like those, where we were connecting to each other on the very edges of technology may never really come again sadly.