Before actual Local Area Networks existed in our homes, many of us hosted parties which revolved around our SNES’s and a TV, or possibly two TV’s and an RCA splitter. When the Personal computer became more affordable we tried hooking up our 486’s with null modem cables trying to play DOOM II. When the N64 came out it soon brought Goldeneye with it and supported up to four players. We would play Goldeneye all night long and still see K7 Soviet or the RPC-90 in front of us when we closed our eyes and collapsed on couches. In one map we decided to play with landmines only turned the map into a World War I type game. People who yelled, “Don’t shoot, I don’t have a weapon!” were simply mowed down like grass.
Later on, in the Pentium era, we all put our money together and bought us a 5-port 10 baseT hub. It only cost us 90 bones (excluding the cost of cables—a three foot cable only cost you 12 tacos.) but it was well worth it—it only took about an hour to transfer a 50MB file! Ah, the joys and pains of trying to get a network up and running on your Windows 9x machine… Back in the days when computers didn’t come with network cards and you had to steal your parents’ computer to bring to the LAN.
As our financial situations improved throughout high school, so did computer technology. And my room rapidly started looking more and more like Neo’s apartment in the Matrix—fixing and building computers for people, I had so many old and new computers on my floor I had to clear a path just to get from the door to my desk (which had all the drawers jammed full of hard drives, floppy drives, IDE cables, old ISA cards, etc.).
And then there was 100BaseTX. We all chipped in money and but an 8-port hub which only cost us another 100 bones. In those days if we wanted to play UT at a LAN, we had to make sure the person who started the server had enough RAM. (It was never my computer) Around that time the Pentium III era came and so did the Voodoo 3. Unreal, Quake III, UT and Descent 3 suddenly became beautiful as we were able to afford 3D accelerator cards.
Finally, in the days of the Pentium 4, we are continually amazed at the new games that come out: UT 2004, Max Payne 2, Call of Duty, Warcraft III Frozen Throne, Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour, Battlefield Vietnam, as well as the ones that are soon to come out: Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and *cough* Duke Nukem Forever *cough* (yeah, right ‘When it’s Done’ my foot.)
