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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

I learned to solder as a pre-teen so I could make a nullmodem :) Then I learned that resistors were a thing when I made a parallel port sound card (this thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing). Fun times!

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I wasn't allowed a soldering iron as a kid, so I ended up just chopping and splicing a regular serial cable and turned it into a null modem, all so that I could play OMF2097 with my friends without having to share the same keyboard (we would always fight over right side, which defaulted to using the arrow keys for movement - and so the person who got the right side generally had the advantage, as back then arrow keys were the default movement keys, unlike these days where WASD is default.)

I wasn't allowed one either so I soldered with a screwdriver heated up on the gas stove when my parents weren't home...

"We need laws to keep children away from soldering irons"

Later that day...

That's pretty hardcore, respect :)

It also taught me valuable lessons about hardening.

Your parents: A soldering iron is dangerous!

You: I'll show you!

I am not in danger.

I am the danger.

[Sticks glowing hot screw driver in molten lead]

Shared-keyboard OMF 2097 also had an overwhelming advantage for the first mover, since most keyboards had 2-3 key rollover--if you hit wd to jump forward, your opponent had to be fast to do anything before you hit your attack key.

I wonder if OpenOMF has the same limits.

It's a keyboard thing and less of a software thing.

This must have been around the same time (1993 or so) when many organisations were upgrading old coax 10Base2 network equipment to modern 10BaseT (and eventually 100BaseT). My friends and I, strongly motivated by the incentive of being able to play multiplayer DOOM, managed to source some free ISA 10Base2 Ethernet cards and coax cable and T-connectors from someone's Dad. The only thing we were missing was the terminators which could be made yourself by cutting a coax cable and soldering a resistor between the conductors... fun introduction to LAN technology for us!

Nice. I learned on a DE-9 cable making an HP-48 cable from an internal CD-ROM analog cable. I was such a poor student cliché that I used Scotch tape instead of electrical tape to ensure the RX, TX, and GND lines didn't short.

There wasn't one kind of null modem cable, per se, there were serial and parallel null modem cables.

Originally, there were null modem (serial) adapters that worked with straight through cables but that got expensive, awkward, and complicated. A universal serial null modem cable had a pair of "DB-9" DE-9 female and DB-25 female connectors on both ends so it would work with either system having either type of connector.

A parallel null modem cable had DB-25 male connectors on both ends.

http://www.nullmodem.com/LapLink.htm

Both were used with LapLink and often interchangeably called "LapLink cables" too because the boxed version of LapLink included both cables.

That parallel port sound card was my primary sound card for a long time. I bought a bunch of full sized resistors from Maplin and soldered them all as janky as a kid can with huge blobs of solder, but it worked perfectly from day one.

Really fun times. I “learned” to solder around that time and age also. Playing Mod files through a DIY version of that “thing” piped into a portable stereo speaker was awesome.

Years later I learned what flux was, and soldering became quite a bit better and easier.

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