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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

This is quite a screed against folks they see as stuck in that scene. I joined BBS's around this time and didn't discover warez until much later.

Any obsession can become unhealthy, strange to see a whole zine focused on a subset of the warez scene. And it's not like the others didn't benefit from the labor of all these crackers and couriers.

Regardless, it is entertaining despite the judgemental tone.

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My 14.4K modem cost more than my computer... ...so I could play MP Wolf3D on a local paid BBS.

It didn't work, but boy, after going from 2400 to 14.4K, that jpeg of Pamela Anderson topless downloaded in under a minute!

14.4 worked fine for Doom MP. Those fun days when a modem init string tweak could gain 10-50% performance increase. Became a sysop of a popular BBS at this time, which led to my 25 year IT career. Fond memories.

AT&F&D2&C1S0=0X4.

Let me tell you, there was more than one

Are you sure it was Wolf3D? The original 90's Wolfenstine was single player only...

yeah that was my memory of it too. I didn't recall MP until Doom.

Doom was famous for being one of the first Multiplayer PC games. There is an old anecdote about how John Carmack noted that it would be pretty easy to add network multiplayer to the code he was writing and John Romeo's eyes practically flashed dollar signs.

Of course as an afterthought it had a couple of issues. The primary one being that the framerate was locked to whomever had the slowest computer. Probably drove PC sales as you did NOT want to be the guy who showed up to the LAN party and tanked everyone's FPS.

Modems used to be a dollar a baud!

We had weekly scene reports that ranked the FTP sites and groups. It also covered the drama, politics, group mergers or closures, and personal stories (under anonymity though). You got ranked by your performance on the sites that counted towards points. In order to upload files to a top 5 site, you would have to get into release groups and get the "pre", in other words, you get first dibs at uploading the files. Europe had the fastest internet connections especially Swedish and Finnish universities. Top 5 EU FTP sites were the most important. Followed by the top 5 US which were primarily hosted at Internet2 universities such as CMU, Georgia Tech, MIT, and Virginia Tech. These FTP sites were the first place any cracked release would be uploaded to. Almost like the root DNS servers for internet.

Its a joke.

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