multiplayer computing rule

I remember we discovered the shorter the phone cable the faster our connection would be. So my friend bought a 2 inch cable and we had the computer right up against the wall for that extra 2kbps
- now this is podracing!
- My family lived in a remote place, we had just barely gotten phone lines, they were terrible and we rarely got higher than 11kbs no matter what I tried.
  Somehow I still was able to play online games like Team Fortress, I just had to radically change how I played compared to other players.
  
  That was me with Quake II. All my rich friends had cable modems when they were still a luxury item and the rest of us poors out in the woods had to make do with 12kbps. It was a slaughter every night after school.

i remember this vividly. going to my friend's house to watch the badger song, etc.
- MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
  
  SNAAAAAKEEEEE!!

When you entered, in the hallway there was a dedicated table that had a landline phone and paper phonebook on it. Possibly a pack of cigarettes and a lighter too.
- Answering machine with the cute little cassette

I was the one whose computer had the internet. The cruelest thing I ever did was get my friend, who had no computer at all, addicted to Ultima Online and EverQuest.
- UOL
  Ew the OG bot farming game
  
  MUDs existed long before UO.

I would raise and contort my hand in sync with the dial-up tones when my friend was around to convince them I was a shaman
"One does not simply access the worldy wider web, my child. You have to sing to it."
- When was the last time you heard the storm? '96 for me. Had either a T1 or DSL connection after that.
  
  back in '12 for me, we switched to cable and suddenly we had a landline and internet at the same time -- it was genuinely crazy

That time when you had to wait for the image to load line by line only to realize, her boobs where covered, and the utter disappointed of the image either being cropped or she was wearing pants.

This but gaming instead.
As in, whatching our friend play aoe2 or something.
To be fair it's exactly the same as watching a streamer, minus the parasocial relationship.
- I used to watch my buddy play WoW.
  That was 2 fold. We did what this post talks about, but i also knew what diablo 2 did to me, and knew i couldnt own WoW or I'd flunk out of high school

Ahh.... Hanging with friends gathered around a PC and trolling pedos on AIM. So weird that age, sex, and location were the primary opening lines of communication for a while. Even stranger that creepy dudes in their 40s were so honest about it while trying to pick up kids on the Internet.
- I never understood that, I never participated in that weird ASL greeting, even as a naive kid who didn't even have social experience I felt that was creepy and dangerous to share that kind of thing, and I resented how it basically turned every conversation into "Is it remotely possible we could fuck."
  I'm so glad the internet outgrew that silly trend and became so much more refined, intelligent and respectful.
  
  I remember (as a girl) wanting to talk to another girl my age in a chatroom. The rest of the room started asking if I was a lesbian.
  Like we couldn’t just talk to people online without bringing sex into it. I just wanted to make some friends.
- Anyway ASL? 31 M AUS
  
  12/F/Langley, VA
  
  18/F/Cali
  
  Wait are you me?
- My friends and I used to do that. We find some scumbag trawling the teen chat rooms on AOL and get them to IM us. The we'd say we wanted to send them a picture us and we'd send them gore, scat porn, and other gross shit. Some of the best nights of my teenage years.
- Was that a pedo thing? I always assumed it was just teenagers.
  
  Parents certainly thought it was a pedo thing, and while there certainly were some nefarious adults it was mostly just teenagers.

skipping around to various local BBS' downloading new shareware and trying it out into the wee hours of the night.
I recall there was this old DOS vector graphics looking helicopter game that was fucking impossible because it was realistic i guess and oh the joy we had taking turns and mocking each other as we crashed over and over over and over
edit: may have been Gunship certainly looks similar. Actually i don't think it was this because this looks playable and fun
- I remember letting my brother’s friend use my computer and he reprogrammed my DOS boot sequence to play a (very simple) bleepy version of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme song & then type out “TURTLE POWER” on the DOS prompt.
  
  what a legend!
- Using your daily moves in Tradewars 2002...

We would ride our bikes to the library because their connection was faster and we could sit next to each other.

I remember going to my friend Ray's house who had a 386 with a ten meg hard drive and dual three and five inch floppy drives. They paid $2,500 for it at the time. We used to visit a porn site called Ed and Eddies? Then we would play a tank battle game. He had a blistering 300 baud modem.
- Dude that tank game brings back memories. The old 3D vector graphics tank game right?
  
  The one with just the green lines? If so, Battle Zone, fucking classic.
- Weird, my 286 had a 2400 baud modem

it's not that old, it was still normal in 2010
- You must mean it will still be normal in 2010, which is the far future when we’ll have colonised Mars and use our flying cars to go home to our floating home in the clouds.

Ah, the good ol’ days, when my friend’s computer would get jacked up from Bonzai Buddy because she thought it was too cute.
I thought it was weird and didn’t care for it, so I never put it on my family’s computer. After it was discovered to be spyware, I felt vindicated.

My first hands-on experience with the Internet was at a friend's house in the early 90s in 4th or 5th grade. I'd seen it before on various classroom computers but I never got a chance to use it because the teachers all seemed to agree on putting the unstable desk-throwing kids in front of them for the school day to keep them distracted.

I used to play Doom with 2 other friends on the same keyboard. One moving, one firing and one (the most bored) opening doors and activating buttons.
OG multiplayer Doom.

We polished the prop to 28k in my full digits year. There better be 7 of us 28'ers here or we have failed - rule
- I remember that one year a generic magazine put out the Christmas edition with a multimedia CD, with various stuff on it, some simple games and other crap, but by browsing the disk (the secret art of skipping autoplay by right-clicking and selecting Open) we found a grainy jpg with a naked Asian lady with fake boobs. Treasure!

you're the man now dog

All the time! Showing each other the cool sites we'd found. Messing with settings.

two words, LAN party.
- No shit. Everyone brings over their computer. For me my first network was the lan party net. It was 10base 2. Invariably at least one time a meet someone would kick a coax cable loose and we would lose the whole network. Thinking about it we didn't have the name lan party when we first started having them. We called it playing warcraft 2.
  
  We used those coax cables at school. Each row had a terminator. I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere.

miss when we gathered to get into the internet instead of having to quit it alone.

No, cause I was the friend with the computer. My dad worked in computers, so we had a computer in the eighties and internet in (I think) 1995. We got cable internet really early too, and my first username was “guywithcable”.
- Unknowingly, son of u/fatpipe & u/maxbaud