LAN parties have been around a lot longer than that. Friend of mine used to play DOOM deathmatch with his housemates at uni back in the 90s.
One of them was really good at designing levels but really terrible at the game, so he'd always hide the BFG somewhere that obviously only he'd know about so that he could go and grab it and then wipe out the other players relatively easily.
The others quickly got wise to this and, of course, DOOM was really easy to mod. For example, changing sound effects was simple: you could just overwrite them with different sound files on disk, I believe. So what they did is replace the sound that played when somebody picked up the BFG with the full length theme from The A-Team. DOOM didn't have the most sophisticated sound engine by today's standards, but it did have directionality, and sounds did get quieter the further away the source, and louder the nearer it was.
So the upshot was you had early warning that the guy had picked up the BFG and could either avoid or sneak up on him as appropriate. Apparently this used to really annoy him.
(This was on an IBM Aptiva with Windows 3.1. You could set it in sleep mode just by pressing the power button. This was amazing for its time (1995) I think - I didn't see that feature again on any machine I had access to until a laptop in 2003 or so.)
The DB25 serial port on the A1000 (first Amiga) was different from other systems of the day. Not just the obvious gender difference, but the pinouts were different as well. I knew a couple guys who tried a A1000 <--> A500 hookup, and blew one or both computers.
Game netcode got better, and so did network infrastructure, so in time this ban got lifted. Though part of me thinks that they couldn't actually enforce this ban without punishing half the school. Doom was that popular... at least until Quake came out.
It is definitely the reason that CIA agents now have non disclosure agreements, but is there evidence that this book was suppressed in some way?
From what I can see it is required reading in CIA training as well.
This sometimes involved hauling our PCs and (large CRT) monitors over to one person's house. And sometimes commandeering the computer labs at school.
We'd go to dinner together at 7pm and then descend into the basement of the electronics department to room full of HP Apollo 9000 workstations with gigantic monitors and an unreal resolution (1280x1024!!!)
Sometimes we'd play until 7am in the morning when the first students would come in to start working on their assignments, our hands completely cramped from pressing the right keyboard combinations to engage the ECM of our ships.
For free alternative OpenRA with dockerized self-hosted server. Last time I did it code build from master without issue.
Later on we had the fun of figuring out IPX/SPX network drivers on DOS over 10base2 to get a 4 player game going.
My first job out of college in the late 90s was up in SV at a startup. We used to play Duke Nukem in our bullpen (maybe 6 or so engineers) on the LAN. It was a blast. No internet required. Blazing fast game, decent enough graphics, etc. Early Pentium era as I recall.
I was new, and I remember that my PC that I had inherited from an outgoing engineer didn’t have a sound card. That was considered a special feature not everyone deserved. I remember me and a colleague sneaking into some random cube late in the evening with a Philips head screwdriver, prone on our stomach under the desk, to take the sound card out of an unsuspecting colleagues tower. Must have been someone in finance or HR. Fun times :)
Anywho I hope that helps to set the scene of this era.
As I recall the experience was enhanced by a goth nightclub that had opened downstairs from the office we were in and was playing the latest releases by the likes of Sisters of Mercy, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and their ilk. Hmmm, wonder if I can dig out my old Mac from the museum in my garage, throw on some tunes and some all-black clothing, and recreate my misspent young adulthood....
Super Maze Wars on my dad's PowerBook connected to the family LC III gave plenty of fun to my brother and I. Why fight in real life, when I can shoot him on a computer game?
When we weren't playing networked games, we'd use whatever came on the latest MacFormat floppy/CD. Shanghai II, Spelunx, Shufflepuck, Beebop II. I learned to draw in Kid Pix, and code in Logowriter (not only patterns, but even music synthesis, on a Mac Plus, when I was 7-9 years old).
Authors page here - a nice read: http://fatlion.com/nettrek/
I was introduced to Counterstrike after-hours by my colleagues in the year 2001, and we were “just” devs in a large telecom company. The sysadmins (HP on-site outsourcers...), holed up in their windowless cupboard of an office, were on all sorts of FPSs most of the day, and hence basically unbeatable.
Based on these stories, the tech companies from 1990s and before seemed much more fun than career-focused environments of FAANGs today...
And then I export the display and start playing the slowest game of Tetris, probably ever. Punchline: I was sitting at the console of an SGI Reality Engine at the time, a machine not known for slow graphics... my lab-mates couldn't help but stare and ask "why on earth is xtetris slow on the SGI?", "oh, no that's just a Navy Cray" <grin>.
//EDIT// We also used to connect to a Lotus FTP server in the US so we could download new WADs that people had built.
FWIW, that's where I left.
There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago." Stuff like that gets lost with time. It's always seemed like it should be preserved somehow, though I suppose an HN comment is as good a way as any.
It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago :) I thought it was mostly a teenager phenomenon, but most phenomenons seem that way to teenagers.