@neil I don't know if it counts, but I've setup small lan parties at uni between courses, we'd gather with our laptops and use ad-hoc wifi to play some LAN multiplayer games (there was also a single ethernet cable for a friend who couldn't connect to the wifi, I bridged the adaptors).
@neil Not exactly, but... a few years ago I invited a few friends over and fired up a Sun-3/280 running SunOS 4, and a PDP-11 running V7, both accessed from a bunch of terminals (vt100, vt220, vt320).
@neil Had one at school. Some of the student IT helpers grabbed a couple 16 port switches and a bunch of us brought PCs and laptops into one of the cafeterias to play various games all night.
@neil the best thing about lan parties was the dedication they took… you weren’t just throwing a gaming laptop in a backpack, you were throwing your back out filling your trunk with a tower, crt, full-size keyboard, mouse at the very least.
@neil we used to do installfests at UCLA Linux User Group.
I remember being accused of hacking an FTP server at one so we must have been doing a bit of LAN at the time... In the building where ARPAnet IMP 1 used to live...
@neil Yes in the past including a couple of the big Multiplay organised ones.
These days everything online anyway so it's usually easier to just jump on something like discord and squeeze in a gaming session.
@neil Yeah, I miss those, been 20 years now. Don't really miss lugging the tower, the laptop was better when someone had CRTs already (can't game on a ghosty LCD).
@neil every day was a LAN party at one place I worked.
We had a very long, thin office and it was annoying to play music as the sound was terrible the further you were from the speakers. So I fashioned some phono to CAT5 adapters, and we routed audio through the network so one music source could send sound to two amps and sets of speakers at both ends of the room.
Also, at the same job, Friday afternoon - if we got all our work done - was LAN game time. We always got the work done 😆
@neil I'm claiming that when we all crowded in and took over all the VT220 terminals so we could play networked Hunt on the PDP11/44, that was a lan party.
@neil Missing option: Spent most of the LAN party installing network cards in a bunch of my computer-illiterate friend's computers, downloading NIC drivers over dialup before google was a thing, and by the time everything was hooked up it was 3AM and everyone was asleep or too drunk to play anything. Yeah good times. >:(
@neil Used to run 12 he LAN parties every other Saturday at Northern Michigan University from 2001-2006. College organization called the Organization for Interactive Computing (OIC). Got a Bawls sponsorship and everything (think that was the only way to procure a bottle in all of Upper MI at the time!).
@neil We'd get booze in and play Quake at the office after hours. Never really seemed much point setting up a network anywhere else when we had a good one in the cost-free room we could use that was already filled with computers.
Hadn't ever owned a laptop at that point, and the towers are a pain to move.
@neil We did play Doom in the computer lab in high school and when I had friends over we'd play whatever more than one PC at my house could run Settlers 3, Unreal Tournament,... the trick was to delete all traces of games on my dad's machine before he came home.
Add comment