[uudecode]

Other opinions welcome. Here's mine:

LAN parties were implementations "instant messaging", "VOIP","video conferencing" and maybe some other things I'm omitting. Before these things even had a "market".

Gamers solved all these challenges when the web was still a blatently crude hack and the internet was dog slow by today's standards.

Then they successfully and reliably pierced NAT to play games over the internet. Even when the internet was painfully slow. Before Napster, before Bittorrent, before Kazaa/Skype, etc.

Others outside of gaming seemed to be struggling with coming up with solutions for these basic but obviously valuable "services". There is a wasteland of failed/abandoned "VOIP" projects from the 90's that still boggles my mind.

Except for some well-funded research labs, gamers did it first. LAN over internet. (Ethernet frames in UDP packets.) It might be ugly to some people, but it does work.

Now, I will let you all tell me how my opinion is misinformed.

[drivers99]

Oh yeah, I remember buying a license for kali.net (which apparently the service and website are both still up) to play Warcraft II. It allowed IPX protocol gaming over the Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_%28software%29

[lotharbot]

My wife and I played games together on Kali before we ever met in person (we didn't meet on Kali, but on a message board for Descent.)

If you ever played Descent on Kali, there's a facebook group full of your old friends: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kalikahn/