4 ms·

I did it with IPX over parallel ... the cable went out the window over to the next dorm room!

reilly3000 4y ago
My friend’s dad was an HP engineer and had a lot of gear at home, and I think about 5 PCs in various rooms. They were networked with BNC Token Ring. FWIW I still have never met a more sane or satisfying plug mechanism. His was a Mormon/LDS family so Doom was off the table, but I sure did log a lot of hours playing Star Wars: Dark Forces 2 and Tie Fighter. Good times. Before that it was the Wacky Wheels on 486 over 14.4, and before that BBS’s. Around the same time, my city had this free TTY phone IVR interactive fiction. You could dial some like 622, then enter 5 to play a sci-fi RPG over voice, with 0-9 as inputs. There were community features on that as well- it was one of those microcosm Municipal Computing, and much like the Santa Monica City early digital community I there there is a fascinating history of these short-lived, micro-networks and digital spaces that popped up in the 90’s. Almost all of my digital entertainment in childhood needed a phone line, which were quite expensive and my parents made sure I knew that.
- reilly3000 4y ago
  http://www.mckeown.net/PENaddress.html http://www.mckeown.net/PENaddress.html Santa Monica’s system was called PEN. It seems like a microcosm of the last 25 years of the web compressed into a couple of years in a small beach town, on the edge of everything.
scotty79 4y ago
I remember IPX over parallel... Actually I don't. I have no idea how we got it working back then in almost pre-internet times.
matwood 4y ago
I buried coax through my backyard to the friend’s house who lived behind me. Ran it under both houses and up through the floors in our rooms. I wonder if the next people to live in my house ever figured out what that extra coax was for…
EvanAnderson 4y ago
Wanted to play multiplayer Doom with a friend once. We lugged my PC and monitor to his house and discovered that he had a 25-pin serial port and I only had a cable for 9-pin. Fortunately he had a box of adapters and we were able to make a “cable” completely out of adapters. We stacked up books and junk under our computers until our the serial ports were at the same height then carefully pushed them together, back-to-back, with the adapters sandwiched between.
- twothamendment 4y ago
  I spent a lot of time packing my parents computer into my front passenger seat to haul it to a friend's house to play Doom - with a 30 foot cable so we could be in different rooms!

My friend’s dad was an HP engineer and had a lot of gear at home, and I think about 5 PCs in various rooms. They were networked with BNC Token Ring. FWIW I still have never met a more sane or satisfying plug mechanism. His was a Mormon/LDS family so Doom was off the table, but I sure did log a lot of hours playing Star Wars: Dark Forces 2 and Tie Fighter. Good times. Before that it was the Wacky Wheels on 486 over 14.4, and before that BBS’s. Around the same time, my city had this free TTY phone IVR interactive fiction. You could dial some like 622, then enter 5 to play a sci-fi RPG over voice, with 0-9 as inputs. There were community features on that as well- it was one of those microcosm Municipal Computing, and much like the Santa Monica City early digital community I there there is a fascinating history of these short-lived, micro-networks and digital spaces that popped up in the 90’s. Almost all of my digital entertainment in childhood needed a phone line, which were quite expensive and my parents made sure I knew that.

reilly3000 4y ago
http://www.mckeown.net/PENaddress.html http://www.mckeown.net/PENaddress.html Santa Monica’s system was called PEN. It seems like a microcosm of the last 25 years of the web compressed into a couple of years in a small beach town, on the edge of everything.

scotty79 4y ago

I remember IPX over parallel... Actually I don't. I have no idea how we got it working back then in almost pre-internet times.

matwood 4y ago

I buried coax through my backyard to the friend’s house who lived behind me. Ran it under both houses and up through the floors in our rooms. I wonder if the next people to live in my house ever figured out what that extra coax was for…

EvanAnderson 4y ago

Wanted to play multiplayer Doom with a friend once. We lugged my PC and monitor to his house and discovered that he had a 25-pin serial port and I only had a cable for 9-pin. Fortunately he had a box of adapters and we were able to make a “cable” completely out of adapters. We stacked up books and junk under our computers until our the serial ports were at the same height then carefully pushed them together, back-to-back, with the adapters sandwiched between.

twothamendment 4y ago
I spent a lot of time packing my parents computer into my front passenger seat to haul it to a friend's house to play Doom - with a 30 foot cable so we could be in different rooms!