> There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine.

Our first LAN parties (early 2000s sometime) were organized without DHCP servers, just manually helping people setting up manually assigned IPs, explaining to them to not touch their network settings until they came home and wishing for the best, first day basically spent just setting up networking stuff and routing. 2-3 days post-LAN was spent helping people restore their modem/broadband connections once they were home again and we had ruined their network settings...

Was feasible until we hit ~100 people or so, then of course DHCP became a necessity.