> And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with us.

Same...

My younger brother was still living with my mom... Once a year, around Easter vacation, our mom would leave for two weeks. We'd all (brothers and friends) load up our cars with 'em PC tower and CRTs and set up a LAN at my mom's home. Some of us didn't have cars, so those who did would go and fetch the others.

We'd play mostly Half-Life mods (lots of time on the "small" map: the little one kinda happening mostly inside a little house), Warcraft 2 and then the Counter-Strike beta when it came out.

Sometimes some parent would drive his kid and check that we weren't doing heroine or something and make sure their kid could stay sleep at night. Then tere weren't enough beds of course: so it was sofa, floor, FIFO queue for the beds etc.

Twenty meters long ethernet cables from the 2nd floor to ground level, hanging in the stairway.

I still have one of the Ethernet hub (yup, hub, not switch) from back then: a 10 Mbit/s Farallon hub. Still working fine (I'm not using it but I tried it with some 1 Gbps to 100 Mbps then some 100 Mbps to 10 Mbit/s and then eventually that old hub). Geez did many orcs and firearms shots transit through that hub!

Sadly I only have one picture from that era and it's only showing three CRTs and three people playing, zombie-faced (due to a very real lack of sleep): not the cabling or overall mess.

Then there were the food orders: "Who goes buy eight kebab this time?". Pizza boxes everywhere.

And then the panic two weeks later when our parents were on the road back to their house: a few hours to clean all the mess we left for 15 days.

Not just girlfriends: girls who wanted to hang out with us and maybe become girlfriends and we wouldn't even look at them... With all of us only understanding years later that, well, maybe for some reason they kinda liked us. So they'd drop at the LAN hoping to chill with us, but we'd just play the games nearly 24/7 and eat junk food, not understanding that we weren't very nice to them.

I remember the PC / GPU I'd take being a bit underpowered at first, so I'd mod Counter-Strike not to cheat but to have simpler models: characters made of very simplistic cubes... Game would then render faster.

And the sneakernet going strong: when we wouldn't be playing, we'd be hooking HDDs in the same tower and be copying directories.

We also had HDD "trays" to make copying simpler (who remember these?).

Speaking of reinstalling Windows as in TFA: we had a pirated copy of Ghost, before Norton were to acquire it. In german (none of us would speak german). And we'd image the entire C: drive as soon as Windows was cleanly installed, with all its drivers etc. Re-installs were then faster. My roommate (whom I'd take to the LAN with me of course) once mistakingly "imaged" his broken C: drive to his D: drive where he had all his backups. I remember him being highly pissed off.

What an era.