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Comment by Bromskloss | Hacker News Reader

> The LAN party, where you and six mates cram yourself into a dining room for a weekend, hook up your PCs with a complex series of switches, routers and CAT9 cables, somehow became quite the thing.

What is a CAT9 cable?

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Judging by a Google image search, cat9 would have made for an interesting addition to a LAN party.

I will admit I have rigged up Tribes 1 over a null modem cable back in the day for local lan play.

The first time I played Quake multiplayer was over modem with my neighbor. His dad had one of those USRobotics V.everything modems and I had a USR Sportster 28k. They negotiated some proprietary protocol like v42 because we had a 140k connect. It was insane at the time.

I vaguely recall that there was a "shotgun" set of modems you could pair up and get 128k over two 56k connections. I had just the one, but it felt so, so good to get sub-200 ping in Action Quake 2 and CS.

I remember a trick of connecting at a standard speed and then running a certain AT command that reduced the latency considerably - from 250ms down to 180 or so. Can't remember what it was but it made a very big difference to Quakeworld. The client prediction made it very playable on a sub-200 ping.

Possibly turning off compression or error correction; both of those would be toggled with an AT command and add latency.

I think you're right - AT%C0 once you're connected didn't drop the line, it just reduced the communications overhead between the modems. Good days :)

It's when you have to splice a cat4 and a cat5 together with scotch tape because your longest cable wont reach from the hub on the table to the couch where you had to set up because you got there late.

I'm still actively using a LAN party spliced cat5e from over a decade ago, though I've properly soldered and heat-shrinked it since.

No idea, I remember playing around with 10-base-t coax a few times...

To clarify vt240's reply: If you were playing with coax, that would have been 10base-2. 10base-T is twisted pair Cat3 cable that used the same 8P8C connectors we use today.

Sorry. Just to mention it is going to give me nightmares about big AUI media converters sticking out, loose, not fitting right, falling off, ahahhaa. Novell Netware. Tree. Booting from floppy disks. ISA Cards!

http://genecatlow.keenspot.com/d/20000721.html

You are correct... :-)

10base-2, we had some localtalk phonenet mac lan parties too.

I think he meant DB9

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