Circa 1998 I was a teenage Linux zealot who would attend LAN parties carrying a Linux box. It actually worked -- at the time, WINE practically existed to support Starcraft, Quake 2 could run natively, and that covered like 95% of what people were playing.
One time I thought it would be funny to run a shell script that looped through every Windows share on the network and tried to open `CON/CON` on it, resulting in a prompt Blue Screen of Death for each machine.
For some reason my friends did not think it was funny.
This brings back memories. Every LAN group had that one friend like you. I'm sure you made up for it if, like my BSD friend, you were handy with network troubleshooting and always brought spare CAT-5.
Great site - I am reading all your posts about the LAN party house now. Do you have the real estate listing of the house when it was up for sale? I'm just curious as to where it was located - you mentioned a sliver of land, and I saw the asking price ($2M in Palo Alto) so I'm curious to see what it looked like from the outside and its location, if you don't mind sharing!
Hmmmm even though it's not mine anymore, posting the address doesn't feel right... seems like it'd be violating the privacy of the new owners of the house. Yes, even though I did post the address publicly when selling it -- that listing is gone now so arguably privacy has been regained. (Or if not, maybe you can find it, heh.)
Look under "Residential - Palo Alto". But note that the furniture in these pictures was staging furniture that the real estate agents put in there to sell the house, NOT stuff I ever chose or used! (I hate it.)
@kentonv, if you see this, it looks like your father's website is potentially broken on mobile. See https://photos.app.goo.gl/3tcui1CXypZC3PfE9 - the photo is a tiny thumbnail on the right hand side. If I switch to desktop mode, it's bigger, but still pretty small. Probably due to the left sidebar being a fixed size and always on the left. I'm using a Pixel 2, but with the latest Android and Chrome version.
Yeah, I know. He's not a computer person, but somehow he managed to set up this web site without any help from me, which is kind of a miracle. Obviously the tech isn't great though. He doesn't actually need it to get clients or anything, he's retired, so whatever.
Maybe I'll help him put together a better site after the new house is done and ready to go on it...
Thanks! Your father's site and his work is amazing, including your house! And yes, I did end up finding the address and listing through a basic search, but your Dad's site actually has more and better pictures ;)
When you build your new Austin LAN-party-pad would love to see that.
No way! The Internet is a small place. I remember seeing your original post and feeling very inspired to do something similar. One of these days I will find some time.
Was that over IPX? I don't think I ever configured IPX on Linux. By the time I was using enough Linux to run Starcraft on Wine, it already supported IP.
love this story very much. I had no idea WINE had been around for that long and was able to play starcraft etc. I have really great memories of playing starcraft with friends back in the day.... that game had enough staying power that we could all get into and out of in middle school and then again in college!
Wine is nearly as old as linux. First released in 1993.
I had some awkward conversations with my parents as a teenage nerd looking into "winehq". They didn't believe me that it had nothing to do with alcohol.
On the flip side, those are the exact people who often wouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed of that kind of behavior. I’ve done a lot of things, and I’d openly admit just about all of it if anyone asked.
On the other hand if you do find a Mormon who took some liberties in an earlier time in their life…
They're good at being CIA agents because they are supple and compliant and the CIA has tools to make that compliance into nationalistic zealotry that rivals the capabilities of most religions, having refined it through operations such as paperclip, etc..
For me a more interesting way of putting it is that Wine is nearly as old as Windows NT whose usermode architecture it’s copying—first shipped 1993 as well! Even if development began around 1989 that and preliminary versions of various kinds were available from about 1991.
Even today, Blizzard games tend to run pretty easily on Wine. I always attributed it to them using a fairly old tech stack, but maybe it's the reverse and Wine development has just continued to go above and beyond for those games.
It was mostly on purpose, that Blizzard games worked well in Wine. We even fixed a few things in our code from time to time that accidentally made Wine emulation hard.
Sadly not the case, as much as I love ASL the scene has zero new blood. SC2 really killed the Brood War scene, and League of Legends really killed SC2. The days of packing an aircraft hanger with 30,000+ fans for OSL finals are long gone.
I was invited to the Stormgate alpha, and while I can't say anything about it (NDA), I am hopeful it will bring new life into RTS esports.
It's still heavily played. There are tons of show matches and ASL which is good. There are newer players like Scan, and we had a couple new guys last season.
Is it in it's heyday? No. Is it still fantastic? Yeah.
KESPA killed Brood War primarily because Blizzard forced them to. Then KESPA itself died.
Lots of great BW still being played no question about that
Ah, good times. Lim yo han!! (Aka slayers boxers ? Right ?). As a Terran player, I was in such awe. And then came Flash (lee young ho), the GOAT. I watched every one of his games. StarCraft 2 never came close to the accidental perfection that SC1 is.
I had tried Debian first but switched to RedHat pretty quickly afterwards.
(Back then, RedHat had nothing to do with "enterprise", it was just the most polished Linux distro around. Ubuntu didn't exist yet.)
(These days FWIW I use boring old Debian, and I'm not a zealot about it. It works for me. Use what works for you, I don't care. I have a separate machine for gaming and it runs Windows. I know Steam works pretty well on Linux these days but Windows is still less hassle for games.)
Red Hat Linux 6.2E was the first "enterprise" release they made. Basically just standard RHL 6.2 but with long-term support. This release can be retroactively thought of as "RHEL 1"; The proper distribution that debuted as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2 was based on Red Hat Linux 9, with the similar promise of long-term support. Future RHEL releases are carved out of Fedora releases, the spiritual successor to RHL.
No you’re right.
If memory serves me well, I used to switch between Slackware 3, redhat 2 and Debian 1.2(?) at about that time. I never liked redhat, enjoyed Slackware but ended up not enjoying the lack of a package manager, so Debian did the trick a few years later.
There was a single redhat release.
These days, just like you, I use Debian.
Ooooh that brought me memories. At the time testing (around '98) all the nerdy rage was on testing the different distros such as Caldera, Debian, Corel, Mandrake. I remember at the same time compiling my first kernel in FreeBSD (ordered the CDs from WalnutCreek website! what a time). My parents where not amused that I broke the home PC several times installing this thing over Windows
I think I needed 17 floppies ... and I could only scrounge up about 8, so I assumed it wouldn't need the earlier ones again and reused them for later parts. It worked! I didn't use Slackware much though, as I had no way to connect that machine to the internet, so it was really hard to learn how to do stuff.
One time I thought it would be funny to run a shell script that looped through every Windows share on the network and tried to open `CON/CON` on it, resulting in a prompt Blue Screen of Death for each machine.
For some reason my friends did not think it was funny.