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Comment by agrippanux | Hacker News Reader

Sophomore year in college (‘97) was the height of LAN parties for me. Our dorm building wasn’t wired for internet yet so about 12 of us got together and took it upon ourselves to create our own network. We cajoled the NetOps dept at UCSD to give us old repeaters and bought a ton of BNC wire to connect everyone. Of course the facilities dept didn’t like rogue wiring running all over the massive dorm complex so they would cut down the wires, which started a months long escalating battle of more cleverly concealing them. Eventually we found the paint company the school used, ordered the same color/finish, masterfully camouflaged any exposed wires, and the network never went down again.

So many nights of Diablo, Quake, Red Alert, Doom and the genuine excitement across the network when connecting a new dorm apartment are memories seared into my brain.

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It was the late 90s, and I remember going to a LAN party in a guy's garage where we all played various games, swapped pirated software, and second most importantly of all, an absolutely terrible VCD pirated copy of the theatrical release of the Matrix that somebody copied off of a PC that came into the repair store they worked at.

One guy realized we could hook the whole ensemble up to a dial-up ISP connection and he could share his connection out to all of us with network gear and we suddenly could access the internet...sorta...very slow and highly unreliable.

When we finally got it sort of working, a few of us all joined demoscene and gaming IRC channels and tried to sorta build a "meta" LAN party across the globe with everybody at their own local party all coordinated and joked around in the shared chat.

We'd send somebody off every few hours for a pizza run, and it being autumn, got pretty chilly by around 2-3am. Lots of caffeine, soda, coffee, and most importantly community and fun.

Days like those, where we were connecting to each other on the very edges of technology may never really come again sadly.

Thrown together LANs were the best! I remember one we had at an old (cleaned up) barn, it was during the winter, pretty cold, so someone had the bright idea of using an industrial direct fired gas heater/blower thing in there, we sure got cooking :D luckily, place was also so drafty that we didn't suffocate :D

In 2004 every dorm at my college was wired and we could play in our own rooms. They blocked the outside but we would have massive Halo brawls all day. I still remember hating a couple players and meeting them in person later, oh you were that guy!

Of course Facilities would remove foreign cabling that crosses firewalls or floors, this is how fire gets across building compartments. It's more baffling that they didn't reach out to the hackers and help them lay cable that conforms to code. Sometimes you run into EH&S types who prefer to "enforce" standards instead of "uphold" them, and that should be a red flag and a signal to run into the other direction. (Ask how I know.)

In uni we were unhappy with the 10Mbps wiring that was in the engineering lab building and took it upon ourselves to replace it with cat5, which was what was current at the time.

We did the job over a weekend, informed IT the following Wednesday, they said "thanks but no thanks", then we clarified that it had already been done and was already running. Never got an answer but they left it alone.

We also replaced our wifi access points with the ones from the law library when they got the nicer ones, but that was entirely covert :)

Just think how many health and safety forms that a college facilities team would have to go through to cut a mystery (possibly live) cable these days.

Isn't that what those AC-detecting pens are for?

If only those pens could remove the bureaucracy.

Precisely my experience with Uni dorms as well, with the only exception that our dorm headmasters not only supported us, but they joined in the ad-hoc LAN as well. The massive sharing of files was a godsend. And this was all over the entire students complex, spanning like dozens of streets that formed it.

My university had adopted a no-wifi policy for about a decade, based on flawed research on safety of wireless communications by the individual who was the university president at the time. Fortunately, the whole university benefited from being wired with 100 and 1000 MBit anywhere you went.

There was a lot of Civ games played with my group.

I just put together a new Ryzen system last night, which replaces a core i5-750 from 2009, (which will probably remain in service in some sort of server role). As soon as I got that bad boy running, I jumped through a few hoops to get Diablo 1 fired up to really run it through its paces.

Nice were you in Revelle?

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