This explains my childhood video game woes in the 90s.
I'd have friends over, and we'd want to play DOOM multiplayer. The only problem was that as kids we had no idea how networking worked. We'd fiddle around on the Windows networking setup, and there'd be a list of protocols like IP and IPX. Words like Token Ring would appear. Just a blur that 15 year old kid had no chance against.
Curiously despite being a network with only two computers, you couldn't just assign any IP address you wanted. The mask was also an interesting thing, examples would have a bunch of 255s but sometimes a smaller number like 248, and then zeros. I never figured this out until I grew up.
So then we'd goof around a bit more and set it to IPX, which sounded related. Somehow we got that to work eventually.
Nowadays if you just understand IP, you're mostly fine. It's probably easier to learn as well without competing protocols with similar jargon.
I feel like late 90’s/early 00’s, on the other hand, were the ideal time to learn a little bit about networking as a kid. You only really needed to learn about IP addresses and NAT.
I vaguely remember Age of Empires had some options for more esoteric network options, but it was pretty obvious pretty quickly that they were hopeless.
Earlier, as you mention, networking was for grown-ups to figure out only. Nowadays you don’t need to learn anything about networks to play most AAA games (I bet some folks learned a lot setting up Minecraft servers though).
I'd have friends over, and we'd want to play DOOM multiplayer. The only problem was that as kids we had no idea how networking worked. We'd fiddle around on the Windows networking setup, and there'd be a list of protocols like IP and IPX. Words like Token Ring would appear. Just a blur that 15 year old kid had no chance against.
Curiously despite being a network with only two computers, you couldn't just assign any IP address you wanted. The mask was also an interesting thing, examples would have a bunch of 255s but sometimes a smaller number like 248, and then zeros. I never figured this out until I grew up.
So then we'd goof around a bit more and set it to IPX, which sounded related. Somehow we got that to work eventually.
Nowadays if you just understand IP, you're mostly fine. It's probably easier to learn as well without competing protocols with similar jargon.