The first PC I ever got my hands on was a 386 that was sitting largely unused. It was at my ex in-laws’ when we were living in their garage suite during college. I found an MSDOS manual in the basement that I read cover to cover, and some documentation and driver disk on the 14.4 baud dialup modem that was on the mainboard. I bought a phone cord to plug it into a nearby jack. A friend gave me a list of local BBS numbers. It took me two weeks to figure out how to get it to work, but I will never forget the experience of knowing I was connected to another computer miles away. The first cool thing I got was a shareware copy of Wolf3D.

I used to love Wolf3D too. Dune 2 probably cost me the most hours on the 386, however! My next machine after that was a Pentium 90, which felt like a rocket ship. Happy days.

Yeah when Quake came out we were all racing to get a Monster3D card. There were 2 Internet cafes in Vancouver at the time and my buddy was a network tech at UBC…we used to haul our rigs around everywhere for LAN events or to get on a high bandwidth connection for clan competitions. I miss those days.

Brilliant. I recall slinging a weatherproofed serial cable between neighbouring windows at college to play Duke 3D peer to peer!