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In those days, the profs were the ones playing the video games.

They were "testing the newly pulled fibre optics" by trying to saturate it with Wow, Diablo, Counterstrike, Doom, Quake, etc.

They would book the computer labs of 60+ computers and tell everyone to boot up a copy of (ahem pirated) Half Life and get everyone one on games and then run a traceroute/ping/packet trace, etc to measure what was happening.

Those were the days...



Games generally use very little bandwidth so that was not a clever test imo... :)


Games tend to need low latency though, so it's not a dumb test.


DR-DOS / Novell DOS actually shipped with a basic multiplayer space sim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWars) in the box, with the official explanation for its existence being "to test network topology and configuration".




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