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Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

I remember showing up at my first LAN party, ~20 years younger than my online friends. They just couldn’t believe I was actually 13. They were really nice. One woman had a son my age that I went to a music festival with when I was 20. Another got me my first job as a programmer.

Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.

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Haha I had this exact experience, we showed up for a Halo lan party (the original) and we were 15 and 16 thinking that we'd be driving out to the burbs to play some games with some people our age, we met on a local LAN forum board.

We rang the doorbell and an "older" man answered the door, and we were confused and said "uh we're here to see ____" and he was like "That's me."

For context all of our lan parties up to this point were us schlepping tube tvs around to various basements of our friends houses, occasionally getting to mooch some pizza off of someone.

Instead, we walk into the huge suburban house and there's four rooms with gigantic flat screen televisions setup for 16 player madness and the entire place is filled with adult couples, the men came to game and the women to socialize and cook and have fun.

They had an entire table of snacks and drinks and everything you could ever want as a wee gamer.

We were so blown away but they were super nice and didn't make us feel too awkward. When the game started they asked us how good we were, "uhh, we beat legendary" - they laughed and put us on the same team for the first round.

The second round we were not allowed to play on the same team, turns out the kids can game :)

We made long term friends and ended up scrimming and hanging out with people 20 and 30 years our senior, a total blast and yeah, I don't see me hanging out with 16 years today.

When I was 19, I used to meet up with people of all ages from various torrent trackers (we were all staff from various sites, forums, affiliated 'radio' stations, IRC channels, etc.) and it was awesome. People paid for me to fly to Amsterdam with them to hang out with even more people and I think the oldest was a guy in his 50s, but back then we were like, I don't know, Internet People and that was what we were centered around. I miss those days like crazy now.

> Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.

Parents were sane back then, it's today that they've gone crazy. They watch too much news and keep their kids caged up, and end up doing far more harm than what they're trying to prevent.

The massive irony here is that the internet itself has become a much more dangerous place for kids than itself or going outside ever was. Particularly when it comes to mental health, parents don’t let their kids go out but the same parents put no parental controls or at the very least, screen time limits on their devices.

I'm happy to report that the internet is still safer than what "going outside" meant for me as a kid. Mostly we were blowing things up or seeing which roofs we could get on.

All that freedom was good for my head though, so I'll give you that one.

I'll argue that blowing things up and seeing which roofs you can get on are a lot healthier than Facebook.

> the internet itself has become a much more dangerous place for kids

There used to be a joke about the Internet:

Where men are men, women are men, and kids are FBI agents.

It seems that this is no longer true, and with the massive influx of kids, that itself has increased risk.

It wouldn't make much sense to be a child predator on the Internet in 1998. There just weren't that many kids.

Oh helicopter parents existed back then too.

And these days, there are still plenty of parents that let their kids run wild.

I don’t think anything has changed.

Sleep in a gym hall? I don't remember sleeping much at lan partys. Besides, there were more kids than computers, if you fell asleep you lost your seat.

I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).

> I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).

I guess what gp is saying is that not everyone that attends the LAN party is able to sling along their computer to the venue so there are more people than machines and of course limited seating for folks without a machine.

BTW, the gp said you might lose your seat and not that your seat gets stolen since there aren’t enough seats to go round, there will always be someone who has been standing for while ready to take you seat.

Correct. Everyone knew everyone, so stealing is the wrong way to look at this. A lot of people had no PC and were just hanging around, looking at other people playing mostly Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. We tended to e.g. switch the PC between players when they got fragged.

Some people played until total exhaustion, so around 3AM you started to see people fall asleep while playing. That's the moment the hopefull looker in the next seat would gently grab they keyboard and mouse and 'borrow' the sleeper's PC and finally join the game.

Good times. Don't ask about the smell of the room after a 2 day fragfest.

Internet has become a crazier place now than it was during the 1990s. Also, the smart phone revolution (with the cameras) has led to a whole bunch of crazies taking over the internet via their mobile devices.

The interesting thing that you point out to me is the indirect mentoring / support from someone ahead of you in tech you received simply based on mutual interests.

Sadly there's a lot of segments where juniors want to learn much on their own, often re-learning lessons of the past that could have been put towards more meaningful progress for them in hindsight.

Sometimes it is a necessary experience for them.

Totally. There's plenty of necessary experiences that are shared.

I prefer learning myself as it leads to finding novel solutions.

First principles learning is critical for sure.

Being able to navigate first principles concepts and learning to use them gets to what's novel is more a little quicker.

> Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.

Back then, I can't imagine parents letting their daughters do that either. The kind of freedom to roam at 12yo that you describe was what allowed me access to people and computers we didn't have the money for; but I've always been very conscious that my sisters would have never been given that kind of opportunity.

My sisters definitely did have the same kind of freedom I did. Say, my little sister took her first intercontinental flight (with two plane changes I think) alone around age 14.

I mean, that sounds a bit stressful for her, but eminently possible. Can't say I'd have liked the idea when I was 14, but I was capable of it.

I still don't particularly like the idea.

Yep not sure if I would have been up for it either at that age. She's always been much more of an adventurer than I would ever want to be.

I took my first 300 km train ride alone at the age of 7.

My parents told me the name of the destination train station, and that my grandmother would be waiting on arrival.

The train staff knew I was travelling alone and checked up on me a few times and gave me free drinks.

Two years later the train stopped being a direct path, so I had to switch trains halfway.

I remember all the little unknowns made me very anxious that I'd get lost somewhere.

For example, they changed the second departure platform so it didn't match the one on my ticket. And the departure platform was located elsewhere on the train station, not in direct connection with the national lines.

When coming back, I remember they'd announce my city as the next stop, and then I'd see these other city names fly by. I remember thinking "They must have forgot to stop!" because I didn't understand that those city names were suburbs of the capital city that I lived in, and that the national train went directly to the train station.

30 years later I still remember all of these. It all worked out fine.

This was before mobile phones.

This seems specific to your family. My family would never allow that unless they knew the parents of atleast a few people at the place I was sleeping over.

In North Branch MN there was an old movie theater with the seats taken out and tables setup - The BattleShack. parents would dump kids there and they'd be there for days or weeks just gaming and hanging out at the Denny's in town. My buddy had a workshop addon to their house where the same thing would occur. Summers around us were just a solid LAN Party.

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