I remember our biggest issue being IP addresses. We had no router, or expertise, so we were at the whims of automatic addresses (254.x... as far as I recall?). Good times.

Oof. Back in the day friends and I would get together to LAN and the first few hours would just be fiddling with network cards, cables, terminators and software.

There was always someone who would just be totally unable to connect with someone else.

I've definitely been to a LAN party where IP addresses were written on clothes pegs by the entrance. You take a peg on your way in, clip it to your ethernet cable, configure that IP statically!

Windows will self-assign from 169.254/16 in the absence of a DHCP server.

I remember the parts of the 90s where the most reliable LAN party connections for the games we were playing were IPX/SPX or worse, as I recall, and they didn't really have automatic addresses at all, so trial and error configuration tweaking in DOS config files, DOS Game UIs, the Windows 3.11 UIs, and then Windows 95 UIs was way too much of the process.

It is amazing to think how much IPv4 and IPv6 "just work" in comparison.

I remember the first time, we bought some 10BASE2 ethernet cards and BNC connector cables, and spend hours to figure out why it does not work, only then to learn the next day that we also need cable end terminators (if I remember that correctly). But then it worked and we had lots of fun.