TheRainbowegoSweet007
19061
413
7
Feb 4, 2026 2:13 AM
TheRainbowegoSweet007
19061
413
7
WackyWavingFlailingArmTubeMan
#3 gamer girl agitators paid for by Soros
NaSMaX
Statistically speaking....somebody had to be fucking in there...
albester
LAN parties, hackathons, IT conferences ... some of the few occasions where the queue at the men's toilet is longer than at the ladies'.
emanueltarnqvist5
I was there winter 04,05,06 the memories!
pashabigdog
I miss LAN cafes :(
CaptainMarkoRamius
The promised LAN...
KAPTKipper
Been to LANs like this. Won a few prizes. Oh the power was shit.
Elkarlo1977
And i was laughed at when i took my small UPS with me. It only had enough juice for 30 Minutes. BUT 30 MINUTES.
jezebel2718
Oh man I forgot about LAN parties. I miss gaming 25 years ago.
unpunnyfuns
I helped organise the first Dreamhack of size back in 1997. We had to smuggle all the network equipment over the Norwegian-Swedish border as "Sporting equipment". 😅
LordHosk
Its too bad it all got stolen by the corporate hacks in 2011
Cranbananarama
How warm did it get in there?
SometimesIFallDown
The Dreamhack I went to got so hot that they had to open the hockey rink doors to let the winter cold in, except now the people closest to the doors were freezing their arses off because it's midwinter. Fun times
SleazyBijou
Not 32gb of ram in sight
thatwoodguy
Back in the day, I owned a 27-in monitor that I got on sale. 1280 by 1024 resolution, maximum 72 HZ refresh rate. Came in a wooden crate. I got it to the bus station in a cab got it on a bus to my hometown and then got a friend with a pickup truck to get it to my house. Totally worth it for Doom and API development using Borland C++ Application Frameworks, on 25 three and a half inch floppies
ejw909
I'm curious what tables they're using, as CRTs were heavy af
LordHosk
Standard Church/basement/school lunch brown metal legs and particle board and some of those grey plastic blow mold ones folding ones they sell at costco now.
G0nz
This kind of tables
cuttysark
that many connections all setup for gaming, must have been a couple of serious routers & switches running it
sv1rr
I went to the gathering in '97 and '98. It always took them 12 hours to get everything working properly, but damn it was wild.
TheWombatStrikesAgain
About 30-40% of the people going there would ultimately have to reinstall Windows to make it work.
sv1rr
I was thankfully not one of them.
PatjoDLIII
Some of the images are from Kupolen which would make it 2000 or earlier. I was there when some one had the bright idea to turn on all the ceiling lights in the morning an promptly blacket out the entire venue and adjacent shopping mall.
Livetinydienever
I can smell and taste it
CaldariBob
So many CRTs...
CrimsonPermanentAssurance
Still got mine. Bastard weighs 62 pounds
Evenmoreuselessname
I had a 17" Trinitron at the time. Loved that monitor (Sony HMD A200, it had this weird block that propped the back of the monitor instead of a stand), but one day it actually caught fire. Had to yank the power plug from the wall and it went out quick, but everything stank for weeks of acrid electrical fire.
darkoshen
I really miss those days, man.
LordHosk
https://www.whalelan.com/
darkoshen
Thanks for the heads up, man. I also miss how much younger I was, too. Got anything for that?
LordHosk
darkoshen
Life after love? Not if it doesn't wash up really well first.
LordHosk
TURN BACK TIME!
BUH DAH DA!
psmith00
and just think this was likely running at 100Mbps.
G0nz
In ~2002 or 2004 the uplinks between the switches where already glass fiber, I can remember the red thin lines hanging from the ceiling and nobody was allowed to touch them. No idea how fast. The ethernet cards of the computers where 10 or 100 Mbps of course.
grendelb
Back when Dreamhack was still a good event.
mos6502c
Another demoscene event lost to gamers.
LordHosk
Nah, It wasn't gamers, it was the corporation that took over organizing it that ruined it and were like "we can make more money off this"
in 2011 it changed from "we need to charge people enough to cover buying replacement tables and equipment, renting the storage space, and renting the venue.
To "If we get sponsorships, we can turn a profit off this, and pay ourselves 6 figure salaries... and next year double it."
DrKonrad
I miss the LAN parties I had with my friends in the late 1990s-early 2000s...
LordHosk
https://www.whalelan.com/
LittleChickadee
I was 21 & in college in 2004, but i was clearly not nerdy enough cause i still have 0 idea what these parties were- is it just a giant shared video/PC game?
Fyrebaugh
This might have been Quake-Con's BYOC area, when I went it was over 2,000 attendies and multiple network games running. Also when I found out that MAC addresses could be duplicated...
stukajr
A bunch of people obsessed with low latency and (near to) 0ms ping. The flip-side of this is staying in the office where one worked on the weekends / after hours and take advantage of the dark fiber - for the introverts and anti-socials, like me.
CrimsonPermanentAssurance
Someone set us up the bomb
StormBurnX
Imagine if WoW only worked on your local network, essentially. But replace WoW with any multiplayer game really.
hellsgunslinger
Pretty much
LordHosk
Yes, so back then internet gaming was a bit of a thing, but for good multi-player experience you had to be in the same room. So people would have LAN parties "Local Area Network" were you would bring your computer to friends house, or in some cases a college, hotel conference center or even small sports arena, and build a big network. Then everyone would play together for a evening, or a weekend.
Nerd Conventions would often have BYOC Bring your own computer areas set up for just this.
LittleChickadee
Thank you, that is the 1st time i've heard a concise explanation :)
CrimsonPermanentAssurance
I went to a 400 man lan once but Steam was relatively new, most people forgot to set it to offline mode before leaving home, the internet access at the event center was way to slow for hundreds of people to log onto steam and cell phone internet was relatively unusual at the time. So for most people there wasn't much to do except play battlefields 1942 or pirate music and porn at hard dive read/write speed.
GiganticBaby
Thats what I did when lanning back in the day. I might have been the best at FPSes in my friend group, but I was nothing compared to the regional talent that showed at large lan events. I was probably in the 20th percentile of people there, so getting my ass kicked at Q3 or UT got old fast. So I just filled my hard drive with mp3s and movies.
derpman4k
Just. Beautiful.
I wanna play 1.6 there
Erryl
I once won a ticket to go there, but none of my friends were going so there was no point to go..
G0nz
The cheat0rs had to put a blanket over the monitor and their head while playing
xerasiel
OozingRabbit
At this point, it's pretty much a crime, not to include the duck tapped guy to the ceiling pic in thosr dumps.
DrKonrad
It's not really a LAN is a guy isn't suspended to the ceiling with duct tape
Anfalicious
Ha! Came to the comments to say "needs the one of the dude in the duct tape"
Hoiloidl
Life, um, finds a way.
We11thatwasC00L
I wasn't there but I can imagine the smell...
BerryButcher
you stop feeling it 8 hours in
MapleSyrupMafia
Like working on a farm, it's bad at first, but then you become it!
ThisIsNotTheBestUsername
Delightful I bet
davca861
I was actually there when those pictures where taken :D. It's a huuuuge hall, so it wasn't to bad honestly
Iamnotacreativeman
There it is.
Mechwarrior719
Good lord. I can only imagine the electrical nightmare it was to provide power to all those inefficient power supplies and CRT monitors. It had to have been hotter than hell in there.
KAPTKipper
Power blips were common.
Grimmrog
tbf compared to todays pc's they didn't needed that much wattage. but sure monitors used a lot more power.
Elkarlo1977
*Tschhhhhunk Lights dimms* What i just started my old Sun 21" CRT ! I still have three 21" monsters around. They need only 140-160 Watts when running but they hava capacitators which could be used for Railguns. My Big Rig around that time had a 500Watt PSU (Serverboard and Case). So yes total 600 Watts max.
AntaNce
My nightmare is the weight (badly distributed) of all of the CRT monitors. So many smashed fingers & trying to seat belt those into a car.
valen00
Uhh bro, a 200W power supply was plenty back then, you didn't need 1200W to power your video card + cpu and a small CRT is in the 50W ballpark vs 20 for an LCD.
If you want electrical nightmares try doing it now.
Drives11
My current OLED monitor uses more power than my CRT monitor...
ToenailClippingsJar
200W in 2004?
Nah, more like ~450-ish for a gaming PC. Nowhere near what we use nowadays though (my fairly lower end PC uses a 600W powersupply).
valen00
A high end one might get up around there. But there's a lot of big box store PC's in those photos that I'd wager are in the 200W ballpark.
ToenailClippingsJar
Fair enough. I never bought full PCs those days, always built my own.
Nowadays I’m lazy and just buy a full kit and am done lol. Maybe a memory upgrade and additional drives. That’s it though.
Z0op
Having hosted several lan parties (for about 100 people), we would reserve at least 600watt per person, most ran on a 400watt ppu and a monitor draining 100-150, that 400 watt is ofcourse peak and not constant, but especially when starting a new multiplayer games and all those machines gpu’s and hdd and whatnot spin up at the same time, youll need to the overhead
Z0op
Myself ran 650 watt, having two 7800gtx in sli and 4 15k raptors. And such events attract plenty ppl with such machines. Modern machines are way more efficient than they were back then. Especially monitor draining should not be underestimated (some people even bring two).
valen00
You know the 7800 came out at least a year later than this and again power supplies are much larger for gaming PC's now than they were then. 650W is entry level. a 5090 will pull 600w sustained with peaks up to 900w
Z0op
True, but thinks like harddrives (eapecially multiple in raid) and monitors dont drain as much anymore.
The two 7800gtx ran on the same ppu i had for the system before which was a 5950 (the old one, confusing serienames…), after i had constant power failures with a 400watt one (granted, it was likely just a shitty ppu, and a proper 400 watt have sufficed).
Just saying, things were definitely not energy efficient back then, even if our current gpu’s draw close to 10 times more power