Comment by anonu
I remember going to the Flea at MIT in the late 90s - (i was a mid-to-late teenager) https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/
Computer networking was new (to me) and I remember picking up an ethernet card for maybe $10. Plugged it in and boom, the magic of creating your own network.
Can confirm the first time networking two computers felt like magic. Even at 10mbps (limited by the cheap hub I had) my first LAN was amazing. I networked my computer, the family computer, and an old PC as a Linux server and used diald to share the dial-up networking between everyone. It was a real honest network and was amazing at the time.