9 Sep 2023 • Thomas Karpiniec
I participated in a lot of LANs in the 2000s, sometimes at private homes and sometimes at dedicated LAN venues. Many strange and wonderful things happened at these events that wouldn’t make a lick of sense today. Here is a collection of unrelated memories which may be altered to protect the guilty.
I was at a LAN party in the early 2000s where an attendee brought a computer that would run just long enough to start Windows, then immediately do a hard reset. He swore it worked perfectly before leaving home.
One side of the CPU cooler had come lose as he was moving his PC between home and the venue, although we didn’t discover that until after we had run extension cords from another room to keep from overloading the breaker for the circuit in the main area.
LAN parties are one thing I will always miss about that era. There’s something about sitting around a plastic folding table playing games with your friends that you don’t get from logging onto an online game.
If you throw an old motherboard onto the 11 kV power lines on a nearby pole it will toast some components but probably not cause a power outage.
Excuse me?!
Here is a lan gord! A gift from my people
