Starcraft LAN parties and the Win98 upgrade era
The classic LAN party. My high school had a lab of brand new 166mhz DIGITAL (brand name) computers. We played Starcraft almost everyday after school for a year or two.
Download the bnet updates on the school's T1. copy them to a ZIP disk. take home & install. Why wait hours for 100mb when the sneaker net was in full force.
My first computer, a 286 with 4mb ram, had an 86mb double-5.25 HDD. I hooked up a paralled ZIP drive, and it was tons faster, and more space.
Walnut Creek.. ordering bootable! CD's of slackware, redhat, and freeBSD.
I can safely say that I was the first kid on my street to "rip mp3's". My friends were like.. "what, you copy the cd to the computer, and it plays from a file? Then you keep files on a ZIP disk, and it holds HOW MANY CD's?!" When WinAMP really did whip the llama's ass.
Then the Win98 script kiddy toys. WinNUKE anyone?? Ahhh memories, back when new hardware was fun because it was a huge noticable improvement! 33.6 to 56k upgrade. Win 98 upgrade on Win95 OSR2. USB Support!! PC Cards/PCMCIA for CF, Modems, x-jack, k-flex, v.90, etc. When ISDN was something to want. CD-R drives were parallel, and took like an hour to write a disc. And when NES/SNES ROM's were awesome because I had a game pad hooked to the 15-pin game port on the soundcard.
And an 8 port 10baseT hub was something to have.. because while it was expensive, it did the job. And PC Anywhere for your poor friend without a dialup account
