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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

You had me at whipper-snappers. I think more people should write books filled with stories just like yours. Feynman's was basically that.

There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago." Stuff like that gets lost with time. It's always seemed like it should be preserved somehow, though I suppose an HN comment is as good a way as any.

It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago :) I thought it was mostly a teenager phenomenon, but most phenomenons seem that way to teenagers.

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> It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago

LAN parties have been around a lot longer than that. Friend of mine used to play DOOM deathmatch with his housemates at uni back in the 90s.

One of them was really good at designing levels but really terrible at the game, so he'd always hide the BFG somewhere that obviously only he'd know about so that he could go and grab it and then wipe out the other players relatively easily.

The others quickly got wise to this and, of course, DOOM was really easy to mod. For example, changing sound effects was simple: you could just overwrite them with different sound files on disk, I believe. So what they did is replace the sound that played when somebody picked up the BFG with the full length theme from The A-Team. DOOM didn't have the most sophisticated sound engine by today's standards, but it did have directionality, and sounds did get quieter the further away the source, and louder the nearer it was.

So the upshot was you had early warning that the guy had picked up the BFG and could either avoid or sneak up on him as appropriate. Apparently this used to really annoy him.

A friend an I had neighbouring rooms in our halls of residence, and both had an Amiga 500 so ran a serial cable through the wall to play Populous PvP. That was 1989.

Unbelievable. I played populous loads on the Amiga, but never against friends like that.

Now that is super-cool. I also had an Amiga 500 but never got to play anything that supported connecting computers together with a null modem cable. I didn't get my Amiga until 1990 but multi-machine multiplayer would have been absolutely living the dream for me at that time.

Those head to head player games were great, but there was one catch on the Amiga.

The DB25 serial port on the A1000 (first Amiga) was different from other systems of the day. Not just the obvious gender difference, but the pinouts were different as well. I knew a couple guys who tried a A1000 <--> A500 hookup, and blew one or both computers.

Not quite as cool, but my brothers would consistently break my records on minesweeper in the nineties until one day one of them admitted that if they put the PC in sleep mode just before they got to the same time as I had, then restarted it, the clock would stop and they could take as long time as they wanted to solve it.

(This was on an IBM Aptiva with Windows 3.1. You could set it in sleep mode just by pressing the power button. This was amazing for its time (1995) I think - I didn't see that feature again on any machine I had access to until a laptop in 2003 or so.)

You can also just edit the .ini file of minesweeper.

there was also a cheat code that would change the top-left pixel of the screen black or white depending on whether you were hovering over a mine or not

2 Amigas running Lotus 2 with splitscreen connected through a serial null modem through a hole in the wall in my students room: 4 players.

I was trying to remember if it had been a false memory of mine that that had been possible with Lotus 2, but thanks for confirming that it's not. Never managed it but would have been awesome. Actually pretty tempted to pick up another Amiga just so I can do this. I assume it would still work with a null modem cable between an A500 and an A1200.

No sure on Lotus or the amiga, but a null modem cable simply crosses the rx and tx between the two systems (so rx on one device goes to tx on the other and vice versa). Same principle of how a crossover ethernet cable was always used to back to back, for example, two machine nic's or two ethernet switches before auto MDIX.

My university's network policy specifically banned Doom and other networked games my freshman year because they didn't like network traffic being taken up by games. Apparently Doom had rather chatty netcode as well, meaning that LANs of the era could easily get bogged down if there were even two people online fragging it up.

Game netcode got better, and so did network infrastructure, so in time this ban got lifted. Though part of me thinks that they couldn't actually enforce this ban without punishing half the school. Doom was that popular... at least until Quake came out.

If you like Feynman, you might like You're Stepping On My Cloak and Dagger. The CIA's basically given up trying to suppress its publication by now, and it's hysterical.

It looks like this book was published and publicly available since 1957.

It is definitely the reason that CIA agents now have non disclosure agreements, but is there evidence that this book was suppressed in some way?

From what I can see it is required reading in CIA training as well.

Longest than that. We were doing lan parties when I was in college - '95 or so. Some Doom, a lot of Marathon in the Mac lab, and Quake a little later.

This sometimes involved hauling our PCs and (large CRT) monitors over to one person's house. And sometimes commandeering the computer labs at school.

Oh that's still a thing

I remember doing that with RS-232 connections and Doom 1.

Yup. It had to be a null modem cable rather than a standard serial cable. They were the equivalent of a cross over ethernet cable.

Later on we had the fun of figuring out IPX/SPX network drivers on DOS over 10base2 to get a 4 player game going.

haha, oh god the twisted pair coax and "can everyone come out and COMIT again"! Man, those were good times!

Really missed that LAN parties, it was something small but so much valuable. Our first addictions was Half-life (got stuck in Stalkyard for months) and AoE. I'm still playing Command & Conquer. Also found Red Alert mac version recently, can't wait to rock n roll with Tanya.

C&C and Red Alert remastered are great.

For free alternative OpenRA with dockerized self-hosted server. Last time I did it code build from master without issue.

I miss CounterStrike

And it misses you. Check out CSGO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkJu4laFGTs&t=5440

I fondly remember xpilot(1) combats at my university. Must have been around 1992?

We'd go to dinner together at 7pm and then descend into the basement of the electronics department to room full of HP Apollo 9000 workstations with gigantic monitors and an unreal resolution (1280x1024!!!)

Sometimes we'd play until 7am in the morning when the first students would come in to start working on their assignments, our hands completely cramped from pressing the right keyboard combinations to engage the ECM of our ships.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPilot

Yeah, done that. Using Arcnet. Which BTW, even though already then obsolete and slow, was way better for ad-hoc gaming setups than coax ethernet, because it had a hub-and spokes setup. Much more reliable than fiddling with coax ethernet and its terminators.

> LAN parties

My first job out of college in the late 90s was up in SV at a startup. We used to play Duke Nukem in our bullpen (maybe 6 or so engineers) on the LAN. It was a blast. No internet required. Blazing fast game, decent enough graphics, etc. Early Pentium era as I recall.

I was new, and I remember that my PC that I had inherited from an outgoing engineer didn’t have a sound card. That was considered a special feature not everyone deserved. I remember me and a colleague sneaking into some random cube late in the evening with a Philips head screwdriver, prone on our stomach under the desk, to take the sound card out of an unsuspecting colleagues tower. Must have been someone in finance or HR. Fun times :)

Anywho I hope that helps to set the scene of this era.

Try NetTrek on an AppleTalk LAN of Mac IIs in 1988. 15 years ago my butt. Try more than double that, and we were well past being teenagers. You younglings have no respect.

As I recall the experience was enhanced by a goth nightclub that had opened downstairs from the office we were in and was playing the latest releases by the likes of Sisters of Mercy, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and their ilk. Hmmm, wonder if I can dig out my old Mac from the museum in my garage, throw on some tunes and some all-black clothing, and recreate my misspent young adulthood....

I think you are misremembering. NetTrek was X11 only back in the late 80s and early 90s. "Ogg the base!!!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek#Reception

Ah, a completely different version than the NetTrek [0] that I was thinking about. The latter was a 16-person networked game played on workstations running X11 in a similar time period.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek

I rescued two Mac SEs from a dumpster, have my original Mac Plus and have since added a few more vintage Mac's and every once in a while I will break them out and PhoneNet them together over Apple Talk.

Authors page here - a nice read: http://fatlion.com/nettrek/

I admit that 1988 was before I was born, but I was playing games over AppleTalk!

Super Maze Wars on my dad's PowerBook connected to the family LC III gave plenty of fun to my brother and I. Why fight in real life, when I can shoot him on a computer game?

When we weren't playing networked games, we'd use whatever came on the latest MacFormat floppy/CD. Shanghai II, Spelunx, Shufflepuck, Beebop II. I learned to draw in Kid Pix, and code in Logowriter (not only patterns, but even music synthesis, on a Mac Plus, when I was 7-9 years old).

>coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago

I was introduced to Counterstrike after-hours by my colleagues in the year 2001, and we were “just” devs in a large telecom company. The sysadmins (HP on-site outsourcers...), holed up in their windowless cupboard of an office, were on all sorts of FPSs most of the day, and hence basically unbeatable.

My favourite times were playing Marathon and Quake during lunch at work. This was mid 90s. Marathon was a cutting edge Mac game made by Bungie. It was the first 3D shooter I played where you could look up and down.

So much great in that game. The rocket noise, the alien chatter and multiplayer game was excellently.

I think the fun started winding down at Sun after the crash in 2000, so he's probably talking at least 25 years ago.

I remember forcing my dad to pack the car with my heavy computer and even heavier monitor back in the late 90s. He would drive me to large gyms where I would play with some other 100 people ego shooters. You had to be very careful back then not share any drives. You’d had instantly 20 people trying to login to you computer to browse your files. Fun times. My dad hated it though.

> There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago."

Based on these stories, the tech companies from 1990s and before seemed much more fun than career-focused environments of FAANGs today...

Scene: '93 or thereabouts, in a uni computer lab and I am bored. I log on remotely to an ONR Y-MP I have access to for research. Huge-ass machine in its day, but notoriously slow for single-CPU jobs. So I decide to compile xtetris on it, which was surprisingly simple (why did a Cray have X on it? who knows...).

And then I export the display and start playing the slowest game of Tetris, probably ever. Punchline: I was sitting at the console of an SGI Reality Engine at the time, a machine not known for slow graphics... my lab-mates couldn't help but stare and ask "why on earth is xtetris slow on the SGI?", "oh, no that's just a Navy Cray" <grin>.

When I was at Intel back then there was a demo group which had access to a pile of new machines. You could get some colleagues together on the weekend to just play games. All you needed was pizza delivered.

I used to work for Lotus Support in the UK in '93 - '94 and we used to play games over the office network once we knocked off for the day. First with NetWars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWars) and then Doom. When you shot a colleague with a rocket launcher for the first time....

//EDIT// We also used to connect to a Lotus FTP server in the US so we could download new WADs that people had built.

Maybe add it to Folklore.org [0]?

[0] https://www.folklore.org/

Earliest LAN games I remember was playing Snipes on the school Novell network in 1991. Pretty simple game but a lot of fun!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes_(video_game)

I remember the Sun flight sim well but it was 1988-89 when I played it.

SPARCprinter was way more than 15 years ago. Try 30…

> You had me at whipper-snappers.

FWIW, that's where I left.

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