A stack of floppies and a hard disk under your arm

We started with floppies, of course. Copying a game meant a floppy or two, and anything serious took a whole stack, sometimes two. There was a special archiving mode that cut the archive into pieces exactly the size of a floppy, to the byte. Warcraft II, for example, took several disks. I remember someone wanting to carry Counter-Strike, or Half-Life, home on floppies.

Then it became too much, and we started visiting each other with hard disks: take the disk out, carry it to a friend’s, plug it in and copy films, games, everything interesting.

Then we wanted to play together. How do you play together? You carry the computer. My friend Pasha Burakov (Zonik) had spare monitors at home, his father dealt in them. I took my system unit, mouse and keyboard and walked across the whole district to his place, about a kilometre, with the computer in my arms.

Let’s play Doom, but he doesn’t have Doom, we need to copy it. I said: let’s do it over the COM port. We connected, and the speed, by my estimate, was a few kilobytes a second. I did the sums in my head: floppies were faster. We copied it on floppies.

And there was only one COM port: either the mouse or the network game. Fine, at least let’s play over the cable. I learned to play without a mouse, keyboard only: one hand for forward, back and turning, the other for shooting. A sort of hybrid. Later Pasha drew the art for our strategy game Money & Power.

The first time I was truly blown away was at the computer courses. We were playing Doom and Duke Nukem, and someone brought Half-Life and turned the speakers up. That metallic sound, things happening all around: we were all simply stunned. Graphics like that, and sound like that.