Nostalgia time! I was scooting around the Internest trying to figure out why our new comments system was acting so flaky (the solution - turn off the bits that were offending us) and for some reason I kept stumbling upon forum threads where people - usually young people - were bitching about how long it took to download this or that patch.

Which of course made me immediately lurch into old codger mode, made possible by the curious way the gaming industry has of telescoping time so that 1998 feels like it was part of the late Pleistocene and 1996 - where this story takes place - seems positively Cryptozoic.

While in old codger mode, I found myself waving my stick and sucking on my dentures in that hideous way genuinely old people have, and shouting to no one in particular about how in my day we really suffered.

I won't bore you with the early BB days downloading insanely low-res pornography on a 9600 baud modem that belonged to a kid I only pretended to like so I could use his computer. Instead, let's flip forward to my first year of university, where there was another kid I only pretended to like so I could use his computer.

This was in my first year of a journalism degree out in Bathurst and it was amazing because 1996 was the year I discovered the Internest. Particularly IRC. Many a jolly evening was had up at the computer labs, illegally logged in to Austnet chatting to friends in Sydney. I'd never experienced anything like it - it was awesome.

While all this was happening, magazines like PC Zone and this new thing called PC PowerPlay were all shouting about a game that was about to come out called Quake. It was by id Software, the dudes who had done Doom, and the kicker was it was supposed to be a true 3D shooter, instead of a 2.5D shooter like Doom.

There was a technology demo called qtest floating around, but I never bothered with it because I didn't have a computer of my own - the only PC that I could claim ownership of was back at home in dad's study. That, and it was an Osborne 486SX with a single-speed CD-ROM that used a caddy.

Eventually though, id released a shareware episode of Quake. The installer was an insanely massive 8.54MB. And here was the thing: we were forbidden from playing games on the computer lab machines.

Fortunately, there was a solution. In my dorm (we had private rooms but we always joked the walls were made of spit and papier-mâché until the kid I'm about to tell you about put his head through one and we found out they were in fact made of plaster-of-paris and corrugated cardboard) there lived this kid who was totally rich and spoiled and had a PC. In his room. Imagine that!

Anyway, he generously said I could play Quake on his machine while he went out to explore his new fascination with poker machines at the Bathurst Leagues Club (go the mighty Penguins). But there was another thing. Despite living in the burgeoning age of the Internest, I was a student, and thus poor. How poor? I'll tell you how poor. There was so little money in my account that I could only afford a single 1.4MB floppy disk.

In those days CD burners were $1200+ each so there was no question of popping that 8.54MB Quake installer on an optical disc. Floppy was the way. But I needed about six floppies. What to do?

Fortunately, id supplied the Quake installer broken up into floppy-sized chunks. Unfortunately, the computer lab was about 800m from my dorm. So there I was, in the frigid Bathurst winter, running back and forth through the fog, carrying a single floppy disc with a tiny chunk of Quake on it.

Back and forth I went, fingers slowly blackening from frostbite, nose a withered ruin, teeth chattering. My mates were up at Rafters sucking down Tooheys New with lime like the degenerates they were, but I was running back and forth through the fog.

It didn't help that we'd spent the previous evening watching Candyman on the dorm TV, so my eyes were kind of wild and rolling by the time I finished the sixth iteration of my mad mission.

But I got it. I got it all. Quake shareware was mine. I installed it on the rich kid's PC. I loaded it up. I ran it. I was instantly smitten. This was amazing. This was the future of gaming. This was incredible. The atmosphere. The graphics. The polygonal enemies and weapons. Everything.

I became the country's most obsessive Quake player who didn't own his own PC. I went on the Quake IRC channel and pretended to be a girl (long story). I lugged other people's computers back and forth to get multiplayer games happening. I travelled from Bathurst to freaking Wollongong just to play Quake on a LAN a bunch of engineering students had set up in one of their - way better - dorms.

How long did it take me to finally get my own PC? Put it this way, when I did get my own machine, the first thing I did was run out and buy Quake 2.

So the next time you're feeling grumpy because the cheap-arse ADSL1 your parents are so cheap it's the only ADSL they'll get for you is only downloading the latest WoW patch at 120Kbps, think of me. Out there. In the fog. Running back and forth, terrified that at any moment Tony Todd is going to leap out and get me with that hook of his, but too obsessed to stop.