My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in.
I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general overhead of running events. Always fun: people who configured the wrong IP address so there'd be conflicts and you had to get up on stage, get everybody's attention, and get everyone to check they IP addresses at the same time. DHCP? Lol. After a few events we switched to peg DHCP, that worked remarkably well, as long as you had a few tech support guys who could help people out setting things up.
And also, people bringing extension cords on a roller, not completely unrolling it, plugging in several computers and the wires inside the coil melting as soon as the load was high enough. Smoke coming out, breakers going off, actual flames once.
And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with us.
In the age of slick unibody aluminum slabs inset with a thin black mirror, in the age of fanless battery powered devices that last 10+ hours on a charge... people have forgotten the sound and smell of computing in the bygone age of the LAN party.
The heat of too many CRT screens in a room, of pentiums whirring away, their clacking harddrives and big PSUs filling the room with all sorts of olfactory detritus... the smell of nearly burnt dust being passed over and over again through a gauntlet of hot electronics... the sound and the physicality of powering up a room full of workstations.
And I'm not even talking about the humans using the machines.
Oh man. I forgot my ~2003 voodoo computer with athlon 1100mhz and a tiny fan (5cm or so?) which spun at 5 or 6k rpm... It was like a jet engine vacuum cleaner to power thay thing on :->. Brutal!
I remember at one of our LANs one of the "two hoses into an open bucket watercooling his Celeron" guys accidentally kicked out one of the hoses and went pumping water all over the floor. This was when an 8-port unmanaged 100 Mbit switch had just turned affordable to two early teens pooling their paper route savings together to buy one (finally! not three 10 Mbit hubs chained together!!), and of course it was lying on the floor in the middle of all the machines... The incident messed up all the LEDs and two of the ports but otherwise the switch kept working for years at my parents house.
We did have a DHCP server - my old Macintosh Centris 660AV running IPNetRouter. It was even routing a 56K dialup connection (that went down whenever someone ordered a pizza) which was completely useless.
I mostly just organized events with friends and my brother's friends. Biggest LAN party we had was around 20 people at our parent's house (back when we still went to high school). Networking was such a nightmare. Either it was trying to get everything configured right, or finding the right cables or getting the right network hub or switch or getting them hooked up right. Half of the first day was always wasted getting everything setup and up and running.
Overall though, loved the experience of playing together with 10-20 people in the same one or two room(s) over an entire weekend.
It's a shame that it's mostly died out. I don't even know who I'd invite to a LAN party nowadays. I certainly don't own a house, much less one as big as my parents'.
We had a long running adage that the games would start at LAN parties about 10pm. Didn’t matter when you arrived to set things up, could be 9pm, could be 9am, technical issues would conspire such that they weren’t resolved until 10.
> And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with us.
Same...
My younger brother was still living with my mom... Once a year, around Easter vacation, our mom would leave for two weeks. We'd all (brothers and friends) load up our cars with 'em PC tower and CRTs and set up a LAN at my mom's home. Some of us didn't have cars, so those who did would go and fetch the others.
We'd play mostly Half-Life mods (lots of time on the "small" map: the little one kinda happening mostly inside a little house), Warcraft 2 and then the Counter-Strike beta when it came out.
Sometimes some parent would drive his kid and check that we weren't doing heroine or something and make sure their kid could stay sleep at night. Then tere weren't enough beds of course: so it was sofa, floor, FIFO queue for the beds etc.
Twenty meters long ethernet cables from the 2nd floor to ground level, hanging in the stairway.
I still have one of the Ethernet hub (yup, hub, not switch) from back then: a 10 Mbit/s Farallon hub. Still working fine (I'm not using it but I tried it with some 1 Gbps to 100 Mbps then some 100 Mbps to 10 Mbit/s and then eventually that old hub). Geez did many orcs and firearms shots transit through that hub!
Sadly I only have one picture from that era and it's only showing three CRTs and three people playing, zombie-faced (due to a very real lack of sleep): not the cabling or overall mess.
Then there were the food orders: "Who goes buy eight kebab this time?". Pizza boxes everywhere.
And then the panic two weeks later when our parents were on the road back to their house: a few hours to clean all the mess we left for 15 days.
Not just girlfriends: girls who wanted to hang out with us and maybe become girlfriends and we wouldn't even look at them... With all of us only understanding years later that, well, maybe for some reason they kinda liked us. So they'd drop at the LAN hoping to chill with us, but we'd just play the games nearly 24/7 and eat junk food, not understanding that we weren't very nice to them.
I remember the PC / GPU I'd take being a bit underpowered at first, so I'd mod Counter-Strike not to cheat but to have simpler models: characters made of very simplistic cubes... Game would then render faster.
And the sneakernet going strong: when we wouldn't be playing, we'd be hooking HDDs in the same tower and be copying directories.
We also had HDD "trays" to make copying simpler (who remember these?).
Speaking of reinstalling Windows as in TFA: we had a pirated copy of Ghost, before Norton were to acquire it. In german (none of us would speak german). And we'd image the entire C: drive as soon as Windows was cleanly installed, with all its drivers etc. Re-installs were then faster. My roommate (whom I'd take to the LAN with me of course) once mistakingly "imaged" his broken C: drive to his D: drive where he had all his backups. I remember him being highly pissed off.
Ah man Norton Ghost spun up memories of Norton Utilities, which had one of the few disk sensor apps (package in a nice enough widget to have a place on our desktops). The competition we had over HD speeds!
That's a part of LANParties that seems to be forgotten, and even here as I read all the replies. Sure, it was about games and file-sharing, but it was as much about "hey you see what this dude did to skin his Windows?" or "wait was this transfer really that fast?" or "did you hear what this guy just did?" little legends that developed in the time we had together and made us ache to come back better and have the cool stuff everyone would be talking about next time.
Before Google had all the answers, before all the hardware was centralized into a dozen corporations, before there was an index of tools and their purpose... we had each other, and that was pretty cool.
Now we have something even simpler than HDD trays : HDD duplicators that don't even need to be connected to a PC, where you place the (naked !) HDDs vertically.
They can also be used as USB HDD hubs, but since the copy button is unprotected, I'm always paranoid to only have one drive in it at once...
I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general overhead of running events. Always fun: people who configured the wrong IP address so there'd be conflicts and you had to get up on stage, get everybody's attention, and get everyone to check they IP addresses at the same time. DHCP? Lol. After a few events we switched to peg DHCP, that worked remarkably well, as long as you had a few tech support guys who could help people out setting things up.
And also, people bringing extension cords on a roller, not completely unrolling it, plugging in several computers and the wires inside the coil melting as soon as the load was high enough. Smoke coming out, breakers going off, actual flames once.
And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with us.