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Memories from old LAN parties

thomask.sdf.org

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Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#191

Post by kalleboo »

JohnBooty wrote: post #80
zerbinxx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the story. Would also love the story of how normally non-druggie nerds get amphetamnines in the pre-adderal era.

I dunno, I think Adderall was pretty easily available back then our crew never really did illegal or prescription drugs But we'd drink booze and/or achieve Adderall-like effects with caffeinated energy drinks. None of us drank coffee so we had like... zero caffeine tolerance. If you have zero caffeine tolerance and you slam multiple energy drinks the effect is NOT subtle of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune…

We were young and would never even consider illegal drugs - I remember before a LAN we'd send someone, extremely nervous they'd be "caught"(?), going into a pharmacy to buy a pack of caffeine pills!

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#193

Post by clankyclanker »

JohnBooty wrote: post #176
eru wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune to caffeine I can chug coffee directly before a satisfying REM nap lol Going on a tangent: it takes a while for the caffeine you drink to make it through your digestive system, so even for someone without any tolerance at all, they could take a few shots of espresso on a full stomach and then have about a 30 minute window to have a nap, before the jitter starts.

Okay, I always read this. And my brother is a proponent of the nap technique you mention! BUT: On an empty stomach, or even if I've had a little bit of food, it feels like caffeine works fairly instantly for me? I'm the stereotypical "can't function until I've had a little coffee in the morning" type of guy. Is this purely psychosomatic?

The speed that caffeine starts hitting your body depends very strongly on how full you are when you consume it and how much food/water you’ve already had throughout the day. The timing after a meal will be very different than an empty stomach, which is probably just minutes. People are more used to noticing the same effects with alcohol.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#194

Post by pierat »

dade_ wrote: post #39
dade_ wrote: post #38

It was a 90s and we met through our BBS systems. there was no debate what to play, doom. Warcraft came soon after. The Internet sounded cool, too bad actually kind of destroyed everything. some of us had pagers. we made plans, over land lines, and everyone actually showed up. we didn’t take photos because that would be stupid. our parents would find out what we were doing. which was mostly drinking and smoking way to…

also, we didn’t get bored of it. we figured out how to make custom maps. yes including our school, and picked appropriate demon for each classroom to represent our fabulous teachers. Columbine hadn’t happened yet. even if someone found out, you weren’t gonna go to jail. Things went downhill fast after that.

I made an Unreal map of my high school. Was really awesome and had pretty much all the nooks and crannies. Even had that weird stairway hidden in a crevasse of a hidden tunnel. Hadn't been opened in decades with the amount of rust. I mean, I did a hell of a job.

Next month, Columbine happened. That put an end to me releasing that map anywhere.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#195

Post by INTPenis »

Fun memories. I remember when we had to borrow internet from a city building across a field, using some weird antenna setup. When it rained the internet went down.

And of course the random rage quits of keyboards being thrown across the entire hall.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#196

Post by luzer7 »

Tomte wrote: post #11
oaththrowaway wrote: post #6

I've only done a few LAN parties in the last handful of years, and they weren't quite as magical as doing it as a teenager where you spend 75% of the time deciding on what to play and then figuring out how to crack it so everyone can play.

Don't forget getting 10BaseT, NetBEUI and IPX to work on all players' computers [1]. Easily half a day was lost every time, but it was part of it, and almost fun. [1] Extra points if a player had participated in another LAN party with other people and had changed some or the other Windows network setting for that LAN party. "It worked last month and I did not change anything!" was always only true until the "and".

I remember the same issues but don't know why we had to enable IPX/SPX over TCP/IP. I have a specific memory of troubleshooting for an hour and then clicked IPS/SPX and StarCraft worked.

Does anyone remember a specific reason why? I was too young to know or care.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#198

Post by sgtnoodle »

gattilorenz wrote: post #138
alexgaribay wrote: post #62

> The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600. The rich kids had a 9800. I still remember trying to flash my 9600 bios to a 9800 because some were able to that. Unfortunately I didn’t have one of the lucky models that could do so.

Wait, why would you want to do that? I still have my 9800 :)

I think they were trying to modify their 9600 to think it was a 9800.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#199

Post by dehrmann »

efxhoy wrote: post #5

> If you’re using a 10 Mbit hub and copy the same directory to two Windows SMB hosts simultaneously it is somehow smart enough to make the transfers coincide so it can transmit the same data to both at once. To this day I have no idea what heuristic it used but honest to god, it slowed down the earlier transfer and then went in lockstep file by file for the remainder. That is really cool.

I was hoping someone here knew how it actually worked.

Re: Memories from old LAN parties

#200

Post by sbuttgereit »

This list sounds like it's written a little after the time of my first LAN parties.

I recall really only having one game we could play (and really only one game we wanted to play)... Doom. And the network was fully 10BASE2 running IPX, not IP.

Fun fact: I have the BNC connector I used back then sitting on my desk in front of me as I type this.

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