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Comment by alsetmusic | Hacker News Reader

You're describing the sort of daydreams I had about running a cable between my home and my friend's home when I was 14 years old. We were too far apart. But playing Descent matches would have been awesome. We got by on dialup, but a kid can dream.

I also dreamt of ISDN. Looking back, it seems such a paltry offering, but that tells you what an old man I've become.

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My neighbour and I did this when we were about that age, and it was just as good as you imagined it to be! I think we managed to talk our parents into it because it would mean we were no longer tying up the phone line and racking up bills to play Doom.

Very early on, say maybe late 90s, cable companies didn’t lock down their networks and you could effectively do this if you were on the same loop. It was amazing to browse neighbor’s windows SMB shares, play LAN games, etc.

Later I had RoadRunner in Albany NY when it first came out, and it was exactly like that. Whole neighborhood was a lan.

Having ISDN whilst most of my friends were on 56k made me really appreciate it. It connected silently and almost instantly, ping times were low with virtually no jitter, it was a consistent 64k whilst also leaving the phone line available (a boon for parents and kids alike) or you could use both lines for 128k. Fond memories.

Direct local PPP dialup (i.e. between two PCs) wasn't too bad for multiplayer for games that era.

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