That was when I discovered the magnificent beauty of symmetry.

And more importantly for gaming, low latency.

LPB, Low Ping Bastard.

haha! wow memories.

This is off topic (because the current comment is just fine) but can you please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673344?

I remember the days when I tried to play Quake on my 28.8 modem over the net pre-Quakeworld.

Almost made me swear online multiplayer off for life.

You should've tried Doom over dialup :)

It's all about Doom over null modem.

Diablo 2 in HC over dial-up in South France was fun, especially with the random disconnection that was plaguing different providers...

Duke nukem 3d. Dialup. Wow thats pure nostalgia!

It would go out of sync and switch to single player.

Doom was ok over dial up computer to computer. Quake was even slow connected direct over modem. I would guess the slowness was the extra data for the 3rd dimension going over the wire.

Quake even synced gibs

My memory was marathon on the Mac played over a similar connection speed. I forget the software but it allowed a networked game to be emulated over a PPP dialup session.

Fondly look back at those times, indeed.

I finagled 512kbps SDSL from a startup telco for $70/month in 1998.

I remember thinking the T1 that lit up my entire school district was insanely fast. That was until I went to college and found they had a 2Gbit fiber optic Internet2 link on campus. That was mind blowing.

I remember the day I got ISDN at and I could listen to an MP3 as fast as I could download it (if it was encoded at 112kbps...)

To be honest, it used to be.

I have never, ever seen pings as low as the ones I've seen 15/20 years ago when playing online.

I remember when I played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6 on a 10 MBit fiber which was very new at the time and pinging on servers nor far my house (few miles) even sub 10 ms. Those were numbers that competed with lan servers over ethernet.

Nowadays I have a much better connection, and yet, I rarely see myself with such a small latency anymore, it's at least twice that.

I agree about the big comercial servers/games. The community driven servers are often better latency, e.g. I got 7ms in this game, the same server was 60ms when gaming through the VPN and enterprise proxy.