I was 13 when I downloaded QTest, the ID Software tech demo, from a local BBS. My brother and I shared the computer- a 486 dx2-50, in our 'bedroom'- an unfinish

I was 13 when I downloaded QTest, the ID Software tech demo, from a local BBS. My brother and I shared the computer- a 486 dx2-50, in our 'bedroom'- an unfinished basement. The antique desk our only furniture, a bare lightbulb hanging from the beams. Our mattresses sat on bare concrete, surrounded by cardboard boxes. My digital metabolism and BBS habit was pretty amped up by that point, but it's so hard to describe the feeling of running QTest. Doom was exhilerating... Quake was profound. Suddenly decades of future progress had crystalised. Bless Carmack for including features such as scaling render output independently from screen resolution (+/- buttons by default?). It allowed us to share this vision of the future with our not-quite adequate DX2-50.