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Comment by ohjeez | Hacker News Reader

Nothing makes me feel so old as reading something and thinking, "I was there for this."

I don't think of myself as being _that_ old (will be turning 35 soon) but my first LAN party was done with 10BASE2 and I remember working a summer/intern job at a factory that used a token ring network...

So either I'm in denial or you're being too hard on yourself!

[ though all bets are off if you were at PARC when they were lighting it up, in that case... you definitely are old :) ]

I'm just a bit older than you. In the 90s I got my first tech job while still in high school. The company I was working for was in the middle of moving to a new building that would have a 10Base-T network, but the current building had 10Base-2 coax.

My first week was, after getting in from school, going around to people's offices and swapping whatever network card was in their machine for a 3C509 combo card that had base-T, base-2 and another port that I think was AUI if I remember right. That way the transition would be easier when the new office was ready.

At the end we had a bunch left over and my boss let me keep them. That was my first NIC. I think I still have it somewhere. I gave some away to my friends so we could have LAN parties. :)

You are correct that the third port was AUI. I don't remember the exact details, but early in high school I bought a box of random computer hardware at auction for $20, and it had probably a dozen 3C509s in it. Add in a 10mbit hub that the school threw in a dumpster... Now all my friends now had Ethernet cards and we could start having LAN parties!

I am few years older and i similarly recall the first LAN party or two i attended used coax. I also once rigged an ad-hoc party at a friends place using a hub with a hookup for coax. To this day i am amazed it worked without any fuses blown or similar.

Never had to deal with token ring though, just TCP/IP and IPX/SPX.

I had bitter flame wars on CompuServe about whether I should sell ARCnet to my customers. And I still own the hardware for cutting cable and fastening those stupid connectors.

So not quite in the PARC realm, but not too far from it.

I remember reading all these in catalogs. Funnily enough, whenever I read a 10BASE2 I feel the same magical emotion coming up; while I'm jaded by a a 64GB microsd or a NVMe SSD

My emotion is rather anger of having to track down network connection issues by unplugging computers one by one, until I finally managed to find which connector wasn't propagating the signal properly.

I have done this multiple times and was really happy when we finally got RJ45 cables.

Thicknet, AUI and vampire taps. I don't miss that.

I recall having a coaxial network between some sun workstations that gave me a pretty good shock whenever I touched the exposed metal bits. WiFi is much better in that regard.

Experienced something similar at a LAN party, and as best i understood the reason for this was poor grounding on one of the computers on the network.

Less of a problem once the coax was retired as there is no direct electrical connection between the computers.

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