Playing with Wires

Imagine a time when internet access meant using an analogue modem to dial a phone number in order to connect to the internet at speeds of up 7 kilobytes a second! Now imagine trying to play online games such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Euro 96, and even Bridge, over that connection. Our guests this week, Phil and Stu Ashby, helped to create and run Wireplay, a dial-up based online gaming service from BT (yes, the telephone company) in the mid-nineties. We go on some really deep tangents on the workings of modems, why just enabling anonymous dial-up internet access may spark some questions, and the challenges of keeping latency in online gaming at a (for the time) remarkable 100ms over dial-up. There’s also a discussion of how having Windows Servers in your backend can be somewhat painful. Do you remember using Wireplay, or a similar service? We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server. If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page. Affiliate Promotion “Don’t you people backup? I backup, and I don’t even know what backing up means!” – Nicola Murray, Secretary of State for the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship If you have any kind of file that’s important to you, be that a treasured family photo, your latest research paper, or just the list of the co-ordinates of your best places in Minecraft, you’ll want to make sure it’s kept safe, right? Well, just syncing that to the cloud isn’t really enough, you need a proper backup strategy too.  Part of a good backup strategy is having a backup that isn’t in the same place as your computer, and this is where a good cloud backup service is so important. Our friends at Backblaze provide simple, reliable, and affordable backup options for your Mac or Windows PCs for just $9/month. You can get a 15 day free-trial when you follow this link to sign up. Episode Links Do you remember Wireplay? How BT helped to pioneer online gaming around the world – BT via Archive.org Wireplay: creating the first online gaming platform in the UK – Phil Ashby on Dev.to Wireplay calling – hello 1996! – Ashbysoft Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary – Valve on YouTube Wireplay invades Brisbane – AusGamers – Adam Williams on YouTube Chapter Times 00:00:04: Introductions 00:05:00: BT Primer 00:10:07: Internet in the 90s 00:16:58: The Rise of Multiplayer Games 00:29:14: The Birth of Wireplay 00:53:22: The Incident  01:04:08: Windows Servers In The Backend  01:12:06: Half Life 01:22:51: The Aftermath 01:36:43: Museum Pieces 01:41:23: Wrapping Up Credits Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW