I stopped volunteering my time to Stratics. Let's recap.

When I moved to the states in 1996, despite earning my living using computers, I didn't actually own a Windows-based PC. I had an uber-modded Amiga 1200 ('030+FPU CPU; 8MB Memory; massive 100MB hard drive) which I'd bought as a student and my parents had a 66Mhz 486 of some cheap brand (true to form, they've upgraded only once since then and now have a 600Mhz Celeron).

I think it was about a year after I arrived that I decided to get one. Starting as I meant to go on, this meant building my own. Just to spice things up I decided to buy all the parts through online auctions. I'm not sure if eBay was going at this point - I may have used it if it was - but it wasn't the only game in town if it was.

A couple of months later I had about 1 1/2 PCs. This was down to winning more auctions that I really wanted and not checking the details well enough (who knew you needed an ATX motherboard and an ATX case).

So, with the first FrankenPC (thanks beans) chez Auz I dialled into my new Verizon dial-up account and surfed around. Not having had a PC, I only owned one game: Geoff Crammond's F1GP, so I looked around for cheap games to get and I found a place to sign up for beta tests. Eventually I ended up testing BlueByte's The Settlers III (still have the t-shirt too). It seemed weird at the time, but they released when the version number hit 1.00, even though most of the testers said it wasn't ready (plus ca change, plus ce la meme chose).

The next beta I got in was for the up and coming EverQuest. Benefit of the doubt and all that, given I was a newb to MMORPGs at the time and it was in beta, it was a steaming pile of elephant droppings. The whole design seemed geared towards adding difficulties in direct opposition to logic. You were dumped in a city of some disrepair where somehow every single signpost had inexplicably been removed - and then told to find an un-named trainer somewhere. When this quest was achieved you then had to go and fight giant rats or skeletons and die a lot before attempting to get back to your corpse dressed only in your underwear. I think only Neocron has lowered the bar on this as the newbie experience (Neocron: where you can attack swarms of flies... with a bowie knife... and lose).

After three days, I never logged in again. It was something to put on further beta applications though, and maybe it helped getting into the Asheron's Call beta. Now... here was a better thought out introduction: things to read, instructions, sign-posts and laaaaaagggg.

Oh, how I lagged in that beta. Once, during a stress test, I was getting 1 frame per minute. And I disconnected after 45 minutes. Turned out it was my PC though - I had a 300MHz Celeron and a WinModem. For the uninitiated, or the post-DSL generation, a WinModem is (was?) a special (that's Ralph Wiggum special) type of PCI modem. The main job of a modem is the MOdulation/DEModulation - the turning of the data into sound, and the sound back into data. In your common-or-garden modem, this is down by a chip in the modem. In a WinModem, your CPU does this. It turned out that a 300MHz Celery could just about run AC and do the [de]modulation - if AC got a bit busy, it was just about able to do the [de]modulation. If AC ran for 45 minutes the memory leaks filled the memory and the subsequent disk thrashing was too much for anything to cope. I eventually upgraded to a 400Mhz Cellulite, 512MB of memory and a Real™ modem.

Towards the end of 1999 then, I'd pre-ordered Asheron's Call and, getting into that whole community thang, offered my services as an Advocate - the in-game volunteer programme run by Microsoft. I'd also responded to an ad on AC Stratics asking for tech types... I wonder who'd reply first.