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Comment by sleepyams | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty amazing setup! I think in 2025 I would definitely prefer something like this. However, I think back in "the day" part of what made LAN parties fun was that everyone's PC was so individualized. I remember all of my high school friends and I coming of age and building our PCs. I helped a lot of my friends build their PCs and we all chose different things (such as the amount of RGB LEDs, which I thought were tacky...). I remember a friend of a friend had a water cooling system and I was so excited about checking it out. Also, things like the desktop wallpaper you chose, etc, contributed to this. There was something very magical about it all. Lugging our PCs to each others houses was a real labor of love.

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And a real risk of a shattered CRT screen! I remember carting my bougie 17” Viewsonic around in the back of my Hyundai Excel and wondering if it would pick up a crack along the voyage…

Back in the hayday of lan parties in like 1995-1997 my only monitor was a absolute boulder of a 21" viewsonic (this is pre flatscreen or rather pre decent flatscreens, you could get like 15-17s but they were expensive and absolute trash). One night coming home from the bars, half drunk, in an alley my friend and I found an abandoned (maybe..) horizontal-able handtruck. Made the lan party load unload so much better.

Also 10-base-2 [1] Ethernet where you always had to debug a dodgy terminator.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

Or a shitty cable. Or the terminators were missing. Or both. Our rich friend buying a switch was a real life saver.

Token-ring marathon

In the previous century i visited many lan parties with my absolute beast of a pc case (an old Siemens 4U 19" metal monster where i stuffed an Amd Athlon setup in with a bunch of harddrives) that i got for free from somewhere. Then carried the huge CRT screen and placed it on top of it. It was insane, i was young (and insane), but i got it all dirt cheap. Most people loved it. And even back then repurposing discarded or super cheap hardware for as long as possible for as many functions as possible gave me much joy and saved me a great bunch of money.

If i had to do a "lan party" these days i'd just connect my Steam Deck to some hdmi beamer and play Jackbox games with a bunch of people.

the height of 'gpu' in my lan party days was a voodoo 2 card.

4K LCD displays can be delicate as well and prone to cracking. I always worry when I am moving one.

CRTs might tougher than we gave them credit for. I once dropped a Sony Trinitron from shoulder height when it hit a low ceiling. Didn't crack. Still worked. (And yes, this was at a LAN party.)

When I was a kid we threw out our old B&W tv. I wanted to smash the CRT but had heard that they could explode so from a distance I fired several .22 bullets at the screen. They had no effect. IIRC the screen wasn't damaged at all? I can hardly believe what I'm writing but it was true

CRTs have to maintain a near-vacuum inside IIRC. So it's probably a matter of safety to make them strong; if they're too delicate and get mishandled, they implode and some hapless consumer gets a face full of glass.

Wouldn't imploding rather than exploding prevent the face full of glass? But I suppose it has to be pretty strong to maintain that vacuum even if they assumed no one ever touched, moved, or got near it.

CRTs implode—and then glass flies out at high velocity.

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