🖥️ Gateway to Adulthood

Introduction

The year was 1999 and the new millennium, full of promises and bluster, was quickly approaching. I was offered a most generous choice for my graduation. The choice of graduation gift was a car or a computer. Much to my family’s chagrin, I chose the computer. Thus began a great ocean of time spent on IRC, Usenet, online games - specifically MUDs and Ultima Online, and the young “world-wide web” just entering a clumsy adolescence. Our journey would be taken together. Here is but a humble homage to those halcyon days.

The Hardware

Does it Boot?

After taking a moment to check the nearly 25 year-old capacitors, the moment of truth has arrived. I press the power button feeling the smoosh of nostalgia. I am welcomed by the BIOS splash screen and the memory test. Alas, the familiar light blue screen with a boisterous “Windows 98” boot screen. A good start! The rapid staccato of chucka-chucka-chucka as the hard drive head sweeps across a magnetized platter. A most welcome chime resounds splendidly over my thrifted speakers. We have boot!

Game On!

I hit the realization that I cannot engage in a time-honored tradition. There is a game that has been ported to everything from toasters to refridgerators, that would be id Software’s brilliant contribution aptly named DOOM. However, I did have my venerable copies of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. I press the CD-ROM eject button with much aplomb. Rrr rrr chonk. Well that didn’t go splendidly. I dig through my trove of thrifted goods and find a 52x drive and install it. Hoo boy, FPSes sure have evolved since then. After fumbling around and dying horribly with a huge grin on my face I decide to move onto the next step. That being getting this thing online!

Nostalgia Online?

I grab the wifi modem that I use with my Apple IIe and attach it to the rat nest of serial cables, serial gender changers, and adapters. I try to dust off the dusty corner of my brain that holds DB9/DB25 pinouts and the nuances of DCE/DTE connections. After a couple of hours I’m no closer to success. I’m a bit too engaged to want to break out the oscilloscope so I wait a couple days for a compatible PCI wifi card to arrive. There is no native support for wifi in Windows 98 Second Edition so I have to use the native software. This means, for sake of convenience, using an insecure network. I do this over my phone as I live in a secluded area and it is for a brief period of time. Sorry fellow infosec engineers! It works! I immediately dial into the Level 29 and 20ForBeers BBS. I lose the rest of the evening to catching up on messages and sneaking time into Legend of the Red Dragon and TradeWars 2002.

Conclusion

While I didn’t meet all my goals, I’ve definitely found room for improvement. I already have a list of hardware upgrades and haven’t given up hope on the task of dial-up networking. Worst case, I’ll dust off my RpISP and my phone line simulator and get it going via dial-up. My nostalgia itch has been scratched and I have a new toy to play with for my retro Fridays here-to now referred to as fRetro Friday.