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 stil

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.