Somewhere in the early 90s, my father ran a BBS. I actually helped a little here and there with some of the ANSI graphics. We got a second phone line for that. Know what that meant when the BBS wasn't up? We were playing fucking Doom co-op for hours on end. I was more popular than the first kid on the block to get Scorched Earth (also me). We later found a dos script of some kind that allowed Doom to run over our LANtastic network, simulating the IPX connection. We were even lucky enough to have one of those MAGICAL doom-hub BBS boards. The one with four phone lines, and using a custom DOOM-BBS client, you could play with THREE OTHER PEOPLE. But it was $10 for five hours play, IIRC. So worth it.
Trade Wars FOREVER. You'll never collect the bounty on my head, not while I have one of those federation only ships, hidden behind a nine deep hole, completely riddled with mines so the AI-feds can't impound my ship! (If you understood what I just said, +20 nerd points to you sir). Thank god for port scanners and the EGA-GUI that came later on.
Slowly the age of the internet came. In the transition period, we had... I forget, it was either BlackCat 5 or 6 BBS software that was essentially a dial-up web page.
That didn't last long. Then we had Compuserve. Then we had AOL. Then we had briefly this thing called WOW internet, then we had the local ISP Flash.net for a while. I was an uber Mechwarrior 2 nerd, playing in a league on Kali.net with the Parkers Pirate Corp (PPC). They bought a half dozen Jagermechs for me after I withstood the bloody trial of standing against three of the elites in marauders for a little bit. Only idiots put weapons in arm slots.
Then one magic day, there was cable internet. Dear god, private IRC networks and FTP hubs. I had Shogo off a private fserv in an hour.
Somewhere after that I kind of got on board PlanetSoldier.com, one of those heretical gamespy network sites and wrote
some boring crap. (EDIT: Holy shit
this image is still on the server. My desk back in 2000 at my moms house.)
Then I blacked out and at some point right around there I met some of you in #finalfight, went away for about a year and a half, then came back and stuck around. Which makes me recall several things I'm sure Brentai would like to never see appear in conversation again.
Then there were some conventions I was at. Eastkon, Doomhaus. Where we prettymuch decided physical activity was overrated and we played a metric fuckton of videogames. Let me tell you, AD&D: Tower of Doom is meant for four players and only four players. And the cleric is a tiny GOD on the boat level.
Then there was more internet. Then there was the community fork. Then there was now.
Then there's that day in the future where I might actually code something I can actually show instead of doing ten billion bloody practice apps.
I am old.
