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University | The Fire | South Wales | Brazil | Hardware Corner | LAN History |
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Late 80's early 90's Amiga's and null modem cables. It was hard work convincing parents to drive you to a friends house with a TV and even harder to find a game that supported multiple players when you got there. But we did. The problem in the early day was the hardware/software support loop. Users didn't want to buy the hardware required since almost no games made us of it and software houses didn't want to code the extra functionality since almost no users had the hardware to make use of. Early 90's to mid 90's PC's (486 SX25 - P60) and null modem cables. A new dimension of joy was discovered when we worked out how to network 3 PC's, using null modem cables, for death match Doom2. Since there was no time or frag limit we just played until the frag counter cycled round and when we hit 99 we changed players. Mid 90's to late 90's PC's (P100 - K6 233) and bus line network (10base2). Eventually "high-speed" networking became affordable for us. Our first bus line network quickly grew beyond stability. The phrase "We've lost [insert name here], everybody reboot" became all too common. Unlike most networks that are planned and stationary ours was built from shared parts and laid out differently every time, depending on the order people arrived. Our numbers soon began to swell into double figures and space became an issue, once we even made use of a discussed car show room as a venue. Late 90's PC's (PII400 - Athlon 700) and hub/switch network (10/100baseT). Star networks removed many of our problems. PC's didn't vanish because of excessive cable length and we didn't have to remembering to invite at least two people who owned terminators. Present day PC's (Athlon 1000 - XP2100) and Broadband To be continued... |
Designed and markedup by M. Frise.
Created 28/06/00 Last modified 26/01/03
