During the dot-com bubble in the late '90s I worked at a startup company called OpenWorlds, just me and a few other programmers in a small office.  We were building a toolkit for using VRML and X3D, which was a kind of 3D version of the HTML that powers the world wide web.  VRML never took off, for many reasons that seem obvious now, but at the time people were excited about anything involving the web or 3D graphics.

The best part of the job was traveling to conventions like SIGGRAPH to demo our software with a bunch of other startup companies. They did this thing called the Web3D RoundUP where each company had a few minutes to do a demo, and the audience, served alcohol beforehand, had noisemakers to let you know how well the demo was going. If you went over time, they’d shoot you with ping pong ball guns.  There was a lot of last minute coding going on, and the demos were pretty crashy, but the whole party atmosphere at the time was loads of fun.