dionb wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:52:

Mandrew wrote on 2026-01-27, 12:28:

Cars weren't a thing in my big city neighborhood so transporting huge chunky computers wasn't an option.

Beg to differ. Here I (ab)used an old ladder frame rucksack to transport my system by public transport. The system case went on the bottom, on top of that the CRT monitor with the screen facing my back. Duct tape the lot of it to the rucksack frame, put keyboard, mouse, headset and extension cords into the side pockets and some spare clothes and bedding on top. Oh, and a shopping bag with food & drink supplies.

Just a pain when more rural people organized the LAN party a long way away from the nearest station/bus stop.

That's even funnier with a visual aid.

aries-mu wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:56:

[...]

oh my insane goodness!!!! you're a hero man!
And how could you even fit the case inside the rucksack!!!??

Not inside, it was an external frame rucksack, I just duct taped it to the frame. Unfortunately never took a pic of the kit, but it was this kind of rucksack:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-28, 21:23:

[...]

That's even funnier with a visual aid.

Hehe, that idea. But having a bit of hiking experience, I knew to put the heaviest weight as close as possible to my shoulder blades, so my CRT was pointed to my back, not away from it like this.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-28, 21:23:

dionb wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:52:

Mandrew wrote on 2026-01-27, 12:28:

Cars weren't a thing in my big city neighborhood so transporting huge chunky computers wasn't an option.

Beg to differ. Here I (ab)used an old ladder frame rucksack to transport my system by public transport. The system case went on the bottom, on top of that the CRT monitor with the screen facing my back. Duct tape the lot of it to the rucksack frame, put keyboard, mouse, headset and extension cords into the side pockets and some spare clothes and bedding on top. Oh, and a shopping bag with food & drink supplies.

Just a pain when more rural people organized the LAN party a long way away from the nearest station/bus stop.

That's even funnier with a visual aid.

Is that a laser printer on the bottom?

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-01-28, 23:34:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-28, 21:23:

dionb wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:52:

Beg to differ. Here I (ab)used an old ladder frame rucksack to transport my system by public transport. The system case went on the bottom, on top of that the CRT monitor with the screen facing my back. Duct tape the lot of it to the rucksack frame, put keyboard, mouse, headset and extension cords into the side pockets and some spare clothes and bedding on top. Oh, and a shopping bag with food & drink supplies.

Just a pain when more rural people organized the LAN party a long way away from the nearest station/bus stop.

That's even funnier with a visual aid.

Is that a laser printer on the bottom?

Looks like it. AI is nearly always wrong and stubborn about being corrected. When I specified a model of IBM tower, it distorted the dimensions to match the first drawing, and then it quickly stopped being funny.

Never been to a Retro lan party.
Do you guys have photos ?

I would have loved to been to a lan party full of old Mac Classics or old IBM AT computers.

I am Ready.

I have my computers ready.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2026-01-29, 10:35:

Never been to a Retro lan party. Do you guys have photos ? […]
Show full quote

Never been to a Retro lan party.
Do you guys have photos ?

I would have loved to been to a lan party full of old Mac Classics or IBM AT computers.

I am Ready.

I have my computers ready.

https://youtu.be/J1LF4GScs7U?si=wraKgXrYJFlLJT8p

https://youtu.be/JVrK8n_FhgI?si=uwL8CD-JeGg-evcv
https://youtu.be/ch__Ah2iCtQ?si=v_pu3o-PLIp-3fpW
https://youtu.be/qMwMVsroEXE?si=Ac66Xna8J38fjHez
https://youtu.be/J1LF4GScs7U?si=wraKgXrYJFlLJT8p
https://youtu.be/GQN1gKU9QFI?si=_N1IMRkZ0sCNTS8A
https://youtu.be/1Hvn5gWrvk4?si=X7zhiEyEVO06q9oz
https://youtu.be/mN7oJMmW7j8?si=1prwX9Z2gnJ5Fa5w
https://youtu.be/Rjne0gJ9XT8?si=9mg7oW-pczDoObah
https://youtu.be/Mfd5EQa1N0E?si=FDdLaSQfITreGtYu
https://youtu.be/jfk_UeWGMxo?si=G4Nw0gpYSgonmQ5z
https://youtu.be/r0PmEHLuPxE?si=JvUv_Fn8-8u0zFcz

zuldan wrote on 2026-01-29, 10:49:

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2026-01-29, 10:35:

Never been to a Retro lan party. Do you guys have photos ? […]
Show full quote

Never been to a Retro lan party.
Do you guys have photos ?

I would have loved to been to a lan party full of old Mac Classics or IBM AT computers.

I am Ready.

I have my computers ready.

https://youtu.be/J1LF4GScs7U?si=wraKgXrYJFlLJT8p

What I love about the screenshots from the first video posted is that it provides real world evidence of the size of tower gamer PCs. Those gamer PCs were funny: oversized, extra heavy, and when deployed at a LAN party they were actually nonsensical.

My own reasoning for using the even bigger full towers was mundane: When we position a full tower next to a desk, it adds an extra convenient surface where you can rest things. I had my coffee cup and joystick there, maybe an audio volume control (I couldn't afford a full breakout box), or even just a pile of CDs. Even more importantly, the full tower usually positioned the CD ROM (or even FDD) near the top (near desk level) meaning we don't bend down to change disks. That was clearly more convenient than smaller towers, even though the tower itself was mostly empty.

But there was a more common reasoning: I remember a colleague at CEX (that's a computer store in the UK) who insisted that bigger cases with side panels removed meant better cooling. DELL and Compaq and HP clearly didn't agree with him, but his views reflected the actual general perception among most home tinkerers of that era. I tried explaining that airflow is what cools the processors, and that by removing the panels he was reducing the active airflow - so he treated me as though I was insane!

And, some people reached for a terabyte of noddy films or other bootleg material spread over many HDDs (probably with various RAID configurations) and all of those HDDs demanded the space that big towers provided - I treated those people like they were insane!

But whatever the reasoning, the overarching consensus is that oversized ATX towers were genuinely popular among home PC builders of the late 90s and early 2000s. That video dates to 2003.

Mostly quickly thrown together lan parties in the hardware lab at college. Before that I would sometimes run an Ethernet cable to my neighbors and play quake3 with their son.

Um, I must admit I don't have that much experience with LAN parties, either.
I met a few times with friends, though. Carried my laptop with me..
aries-mu, if you're curious, also look for "copy parties", which sort of were the spiritual predecessors to LAN parties.
For example, Amiga users met to exchange software, talk, play games etc.
Demo scene also was related to that ("demo party" was another term).

I never experienced any kind of LAN party growing up in the 90s and 00s. Not even with game consoles that were networked. I did one time try a dial up game of Doom with my friend down the road but it was too laggy. I would read about them in PC Gamer and Maximum PC and considered them the stuff of legends.

I went to two LAN parties only. First was in someone's house. Temporary desks in every room, cables everywhere, very disorganised, and groups of people playing different games. Lots of Swapping of cracked games and ripped movies occurred. There was lots of Pizza and alcohol consumption. The toilet was in a disgusting state and so was the kitchen. Once we were too tired to continue we then spent the night sleeping on the floor. Parts of the party I enjoyed, but others I really didn't. So didn't go back for another one there. I took my desktop PC and CRT to this LAN party in my car.

The second LAN party was much better organised. Was in someone's garage. Was all neatly set up with about 20 tables in the centre and each station had easy access to power and LAN. Was much more organised, and we played various games, but all playing the same game, and took votes on what to play next. I have to say, that one I enjoyed more. For this LAN party I had a gaming laptop with Pentium M CPU. I was the only person with a laptop. I was first met with disapproving looks by people thinking the machine wouldn't be able to play games, but actually it did better than most people's desktops.

dionb wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:52:

[
Beg to differ. Here I (ab)used an old ladder frame rucksack to transport my system by public transport.

You forgot the part where my mom whopped my ass for even thinking of taking my $1200 PC out of the house. 😁

I remember some friends who setup a LAN in their rented house (coax cable running around using personal Netware) to play DOOM 2 and later Quake in the 90's (back when everyone only had CRT monitors). Dragging a PC around wasn't that bad because we all had cars, the only issue was desktop space. All that stuff ended around 2000 when broadband came around. Even before broadband I transitioned to playing age of empires 1, Rise of Rome, and Command and Conquer over a modem with a friend I had in the same city (we also played in my house using a spare PC in the other room).

Good...not... more than good, amazing memories from 90s

remember start doing lan with friends to play doom, year 94

Yes broadband killed LANs. I went to a few in the early-mid 2000s.

The last one was organized by a guy living out in the middle of nowhere which still didn't have broadband, so while the rest of us played games he spent all his time downloading our collections of stuff haha.

Please define "broadband". 🙂 In my country, ADSL just started in 1999/2000.
It wasn't available in all places, yet, it took time.
Ran at 768 KBit/s downstream (128 KBit/s upstream) in best cases.
Up until that, ISDN with 64 Kbit/s or 128 KBit/s (two channels combined) was the best there was to mortals (companies/unis had T1 equivalent).
Ordinary people had dial-up and 56k modems, still.

In 2001, about 1.9 mio. DSL connections were set up country wide (vs 82 mio people).
Internet speed wasn't nearly as good as a LAN connection @10/100 MBit.
In 2002, DSL got 2 Mbit/s downstream. In 2004, 6 Mbit/s were available. In 2005 the ADSL2+ was introduced. In 2006, 16 MBit/s (1024 KBit/s upstream) were available.

Under ideal circumstances only, of course. Line quality of the copper wires of the landlines limited speed.
In eastern parts of the country, iron wires and non-twisted pair telephone lines were still in use sometimes.

Only alternative (except satellite internet) to private people was cable internet,
but it was a shared medium and the vintage amplifiers installed had limited bandwidth.
Ping times were worse than with DSL or modem, even.

aries-mu wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:54:

Wooooow!
Even to one like me who had never such experiences, it sounds LAN parties scaled to titan's level!

The commercially operated ones with fee for entry scaled to thousands of computers in some locations

Jo22 wrote on 2026-02-01, 10:31:

Please define "broadband". 🙂 In my country, ADSL just started in 1999/2000.

My house got 512/128 cable internet in 2000, whether or not it met the definition of broadband it brought the ping time in games from 120ms to 15ms which meant it was no longer necessary to go to a LAN party to experience low latency online play

In 2001 I was renting a room in a unit. All I could afford was 128/64 ADSL (and noodles for dinner 🤣). Coming from dialup, it was life changing. I was amazed I could play Counter-Strike online (low latency). Little did I know it was the beginning of end for my LANing days.

On another note, I’m shocked that some people on Vogons haven’t been to LAN parties. It never crossed my mind. I just assumed anyone who liked retro PCs had been to a LAN party. Some of my desire to build retro systems is to replicate computers (I really wanted) my friends had at LAN parties.

Jo22 wrote on 2026-02-01, 10:31:

Please define "broadband". 🙂 In my country, ADSL just started in 1999/2000. It wasn't available in all places, yet, it took tim […]
Show full quote

Please define "broadband". 🙂 In my country, ADSL just started in 1999/2000.
It wasn't available in all places, yet, it took time.
Ran at 768 KBit/s downstream (128 KBit/s upstream) in best cases.
Up until that, ISDN with 64 Kbit/s or 128 KBit/s (two channels combined) was the best there was to mortals (companies/unis had T1 equivalent).
Ordinary people had dial-up and 56k modems, still.

In 2001, about 1.9 mio. DSL connections were set up country wide (vs 82 mio people).
Internet speed wasn't nearly as good as a LAN connection @10/100 MBit.
In 2002, DSL got 2 Mbit/s downstream. In 2004, 6 Mbit/s were available. In 2005 the ADSL2+ was introduced. In 2006, 16 MBit/s (1024 KBit/s upstream) were available.

Under ideal circumstances only, of course. Line quality of the copper wires of the landlines limited speed.
In eastern parts of the country, iron wires and non-twisted pair telephone lines were still in use sometimes.

Only alternative (except satellite internet) to private people was cable internet,
but it was a shared medium and the vintage amplifiers installed had limited bandwidth.
Ping times were worse than with DSL or modem, even.

Games were designed for the technologies available. Quake III Arena requests only 25Kbps (up and down), so any increase on 50Kbps total did not improve gameplay. On paper, dial-up in ~1999 had overcapacity (112Kbps "shotgun" > 56Kbps > 50Kbps) but real-world dial-up performance depended on where you lived, how close the exchange was, time of day, and even the weather.

On a sunny day when more people are outside playing ball, I could connect to a local server hosted by a local ISP and have good gameplay. If someone else was connecting from far away on a rainy day over congested dial-up they would have ghosting and lag. So the actual routine was to watch server stats to join where connections looked good. If none of the connections looked good then we might try a different game, or do something else. LANs removed the randomness, but they needed to be planned.

So gameplay wasn't only about technology, it was about luck and the social behaviours we developed to mitigate bad luck.

Enthusiast gamers with spare money were using much older ISDN instead of 56K dial-up. ISDN solved the problem because it used new lines with less contention and less randomness so it reliably saturated Quake III Arena's 50Kbps limit - and old ISDN did that better than early ADSL could. Back then money partly trumped luck, just as it does today.

aries-mu wrote on 2026-01-27, 09:49:

In Italy, where I spent my childhood and adolescence, it was different.

How reliable was your Internet connection? Where were your chosen game servers? 😀

zuldan wrote on 2026-02-01, 11:21:

I just assumed anyone who liked retro PCs had been to a LAN party.

My view is that a lot of retro gaming is about exploring earlier memories. There would be overlaps because everyone had different personal circumstances, but looking at the size and weight of steel PC towers (let alone the monitors) LAN parties were not kid-friendly.