4 ms·
When I got my first cable modem in maybe 1995, there were about half a dozen of my neighbors computers in Network Neighborhood. Most with unprotected shares an
by skipkey 2y ago
When I got my first cable modem in maybe 1995, there were about half a dozen of my neighbors computers in Network Neighborhood. Most with unprotected shares and printers. Basically everyone running Windows on my C block. It got cleaned up within a few months tho.
- codetrotter 2y agoSaw something similar at the summerhouse of a friend around 2008 or 2009. Somehow the whole neighborhood was in one giant LAN with one another there, sharing a common gateway to the internet? Around 30 or some such computers of neighbors showed up. Super weird.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoPre-cable modem era, the dialup networking "adapter" in Windows 95 was bound to "File and Print Sharing". People who had both a LAN and a modem could inadvertently "share" with the Internet. I may or may not know something about sending print jobs that said "FEED ME CHEESE" in Figlet to inadvertantly shared printers and waiting for pings to stop coming back.
- siromega 2y agoYou’re lucky it was only a few months. I think it took until 1999 or 2000 for my cable isp to subnet their entire /16 so that you weren’t flooding the entire city with broadcast packets, getting random windows messaging service messages, etc. That said, it was super nice to open Quake 3 and be able to plan LAN mode with anyone in town.
- anyfoo 2y agoI stand corrected (sort of). I did specifically say that you‘d see zero other machines when connected to the Internet over a point-to-point link, but I indeed had no idea that in the US there were cable modems from different subscribers within the same subnet/segment and without any filtering. In Germany, as far as I can tell it was all point-to-point. That being said, around that time, or maybe slightly later, completely unencrypted WiFi networks were also commonplace, so…