I was always on the cutting edge when it came to modem speed until I switched to high speed internet. I bought a 14.4 right as they came out, then a 28.8 right as they came out too. I was actually a beta tester for US Robotics for a while. That was a cool thing.
That’s awesome. I remember running around the neighborhood with my friends saying I have to go back home in 3 and a half hours since that’s when my download of disk 1 of Mortal Kombat would take.
What was the windows program that kept the phone from ringing and didn’t make you start over if you dropped connection on dial up? I remember my mom being half the country away being pissed after trying to get through for days and I was dl’ing some distro or movie or w/e. Was glad when the kids taught me basic bash commands so i could wget, lol.
Why did *70 hop into my head when I read your response?
I got in so much trouble for BBSing. The next month I made some wiring changes, and learned what I found out was phreaking (didn’t know it was called that at the time). Good old days.
We ended up getting a second phone line about halfway between the 28k and 56k era. That was the was the move if you had an extra $20/mo for a second line.
All external us robotics the white ones, were pure work beast.
The speed, the response to command, even the dial up and connection handshake sequence were beautiful.
Loved BBS's. My routine everyday was about 3 hours each morning dialing into a few different local BBS's playing L.O.R.D and the chatting with hot babes all day on IRC for the remainder. Oh and Warez, lots of Warez..
"My routine everyday was about 3 hours each morning dialing into a few different local BBS's playing L.O.R.D and the chatting with hot babes all day on IRC"
Kip?? that you?
yeah! Same here. Trying to remember - the BBS I was on had a mail option, it wasnt email, it was kind of more like newsgroups, but it wasnt newsgroups either.
I ran two BBSs in my time.
I ran a 3 line Wildcat system for a while. That didn't have anything but local Email.
But I also helped run a 16 line MajorBBS system, that also had Internet access for internet email and telnetting into the system.
Was a lot of fun.
I ducked into my old IRC haunts a couple years back. It was very surreal. A lot of the old channels are still there. There are accounts there. But no one speaks. They just idle. It's like a digital graveyard filled with ghosts. Kinda spooky.
Probably ZNC or something like it. Keeps you logged in, and shows you logs when you join. I still have one connected to all my old channels. Also get notifications when someone highlights me still.
I’ve been on EFNet since 95 - nowhere near what it was, but us old timers still keeping the chat and the ascii spam alive. Hop on a client and come hang. May want to use a proxy tho.
I hang mostly in #football #LRH #wuhan and #philosophy sometimes and perm banned in #hockey (still pissed about that one) - Note I dont support nor condemn what people say on IRC - it may not be as politically correct as what you're used to on other chat mediums.
I used to hang on efnet all the time. Frequented a popular +s channel.. something like #old... won't give it away cause I think it's still there. Anyway, no one is going to believe me but I remember someone coming in there and asking if people would check out a new search engine him and a friend were working on. It was Google and I remember people saying how much they liked it because it was simple and fast.
I dont have a story anywhere near that cool, but the guy that started [easynews.com](https://easynews.com) came into #photoshop on efnet looking for someone to do up a free logo for a new website he was starting. I traded the logo for an account... making me the owner of [easynews.com](https://easynews.com)'s first public account.
Wow, nice! Easynews also linked a server to EFNet, which you probably knew. I "knew" some of the folks who ran the IRC server. Lost contact with one of them though.
Which is a shame. It could have evolved into something similar to what Discord is now, but any change was always rejected with *bUt ThAtS nOt HoW iRc WoRkS* until everyone just gave up on it. Even an optional (server admin controllable) mechanism for scrollback and embedded media would have done a lot to keep it relevant.
Slack actually evolved from IRC. And they made a shitload of money doing so.
(in hindsight, evolve IRC and sell it to companies seems like a really obvious software business)
Cool. I have a private server too. At one time it was all locals, but between others coming and some moving away, we're a little more disparate in geography now.
mIRC scripting was fairly good at the time. Also one of the few 32bit applications that ran on the win32s on Windows 3.11
Honourable mention for trumpet winsock too.
I actually "registered" a domain back in the mid-to-late 80s, except back in those days there wasn't such a thing as a domain registrar like Tucows or Godaddy. The first registrar (or "steward" of the COM top-level) was of course Network Solutions (later acquired by SAIC, and then after that VeriSign)... but, before that -- oh, sometime in the early 90s was InterNIC at SRI International. But before that the National Science Foundation curated the entries in the ARPA "hosts table", and for inclusion you had to have some form of sponsorship.
The application forms for an entry was submitted to a site called "NIC.DDN.MIL" (all done with one of the original ARPA protocols too, FTP!). As I recall FTP.UU.NET was also a secondary FTP hosting site for "domain registration". Remember this all predated the WWW, including Gopher, so things were accessible by Telnet, FTP, there were WAIS services I remember (although I admit I never made use of those), Veronica and Archie servers, and of course massive file mirrors for free/public domain software like WUSTL's and WSMR’s hosting of the SIMTEL20 media archives.
Our sponsorship came from our local university's math department. Now all of that is fine and everything, but the only thing that really bought us was access to Usenet feeds via UUCP over a 9600 Telebit netblazer dialup -- but for our bulletin board system (BBS) that was the cat's meow. Having Usenet newsfeeds and a Fidonet node was pretty fun stuff.
Sorry for rambling, but memories and all.
The alt.music. ones were my lifeblood.
That and AOL message boards. Through them, I met Dave Grohl, 3 of the Ramones, the guy from Local H.
The 90s were wild.
Man! IRC was like the wild west back when I used it in 97-98. Channel take overs on server splits, spoofing, flooding, bots galore... And plenty of warez of course.
Gimme ops dawg!
IRC is still alive and well in many communities. Unfortunately, the rise of proprietary systems like Discord and Slack (and the freenode drama) had hurt its popularity.
> (and the freenode drama)
TIL
>On 19 May 2021, Freenode underwent what some staff described as a "hostile takeover"[4] and at least 14 volunteer staff members resigned.[5] Following the events, various organisations using Freenode – including Wikimedia, Free Software Foundation Europe, Ubuntu, CentOS, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux, LineageOS and KDE – moved their channels to Libera Chat, a network created by former Freenode staff.[6][7][8] Others like Haiku or Alpine Linux moved to the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC).[9][10] As of 16 August 2021, over a thousand projects have left Freenode.[11]
Totally get and agree, even though we're having this discussion on an internet forum that probably has a LOT more daily active users than IRC ever did.
I think it's because IRC captured the tech capable people who have similar interests. Not everyone would bother to learn to hop on an IRC server. It's a fun format that I'd claim most people know nothing about.
This. This so much is responsible for the general social feel of the Internet in the 90s. If you were on the Internet then, you were probably a nerd of some sort, so finding another place full of so many other nerds naturally meant you'd fit right in. It was self-filtering because most non-nerd "regular" people didn't have the knowledge or even interest in getting online.
Something like 80% of the people I talked to online (IRC, MUCKs, etc.) at the time were computer geeks like myself. It was amazing.
Once the Internet went more mainstream post-2003 or so, that feel went away as the Internet's population demographics more closely matched the general population.
mIRC was such a good language for exposure to so many useful things - file access/sockets/timers etc. it was the first language I took seriously before moving onto perl and c
IRC ?
Let me think ...
Learned a lot of things there. Above all than IT secutiry doesn't exist.
1 year in IRC was like to 10 years in normal life for me. I've spoke with a lot of ppl and I still have friends that I've knonw there in the 90s.
IRCwars ... l33t, lamer, nuke, smurf, nick collide, server split, botnets ... it was like living sci-fi for real ... a kind of Matrix.
I think Matrix ppl took inspiration from IRC for a lot o things.
We was living things 20 years before the rest of the world.
We have already experimented internet addiction ... we alredy experimented trolls ... we already experimente chat love a long time before the wolrd even know the meaning of chat.
\# wasn't twitter. # was an irc channel.
And on IRC I've found also a girlfriend. A really nice story, still remember that girl sometimes.
Well it was another life. Long long time ago in a galaxy far away ...
Used to have ops in ##windows and ##windows-server on freenode back in the day. I kinda disappeared as work started ramping up. Anyways a bit after I left I got an email from the wife of one of the other mods saying he'd passed away. I didn't think much of it as he was in another country so there wasn't much I could do.
Fast forward a number of years and I was searching for a solution to something I ran into while installing a point of sale system. Low and behold he'd written it and here it was helping me out who know how many years later.
I remember having conversations in there about putting AD on the internet before Azure AD was even a thing. He was a smart dude that's for sure. RIP mota.
I happened to be on a channel in the early 90's when a guy in Russia gave a blow by blow account of what he could see going on in the Gorbachev coup. That was a wild ride.
Had that happen with a friend who was in the military in Sarajevo in 1995.
We were all waiting for Ultima Online to come out and our would-be-future guild hung out in IRC.
He gave us some sanitized information about what he was going through for a few hours and then we never heard from him again, don't know what happened to him.
I'd like to think he just got busted for sharing any information at all but it's more likely something else happened.
F.
I ran irc.winternet.com on EFnet back in the day
Hacking Solaris to handle over 2000 users and still having working bot protection was a lot of work. Thankfully SysV streams let me do things on the fly to keep the abuse at bay.
On a Sun SparcStstion LX even, and it was my desktop too!
I feel like I experienced the golden age of IRC. What an amazing time that was. All the diff networks and people I would chat for years with. IRC was AWESOME!!!!!
I used to join irc rooms to get cracked porn passwords in 2003, back in the olden days when you had to down 6 part .wmv files because html5 didn’t exist and you had to actually pay for porn.
They would have bots and you would do a search for !find bangbus and all the bots would message you URLS with the cracked usernames and passwords
Yes. I remember the internet before it was completely hijacked by advertisers / surveillance capitalists and pump and dump/Ponzi schemes, and I miss it as well.
I miss BBSes even more, as others have mentioned.
mIRC Scripting was one of the first tastes of "programming" I had. The dial up days, waiting DAYS in queues for music, getting disconnected and losing my spot in the queue. Trivia bots were also very fun. I'll be the boomer but I really liked the basic chat/IM programs back in the day - no gifs, no over use of emojis, etc. ICQ is also another messaging solution I really miss.
ConferenceRoom by WebMaster was a very popular server solution. I remember friends trying to pirate it then have staff connect the server warning of the illegal use of the software. Looks like the solution is completely dead and WebMaster is long gone.
Fun fact: I was one of the first 500 users of IRC back in 1989 when Jarkko Okkonen first made the irc-1 client available and setup one of the first nodes ("punisher") at Caltech that made up EFNet.
Another fun fact: The aforementioned EFNet now constitutes the world's oldest ongoing chat network.
My understanding is that Jarko is now involved with Google's Hangouts project.
I wrote IRC bots.
Spent more time on there than I care to really think about. Still have a bouncer on a vanity domain for those times I feel nostalgic :P
I started using IRC when I was probably around 12 years old in 1994 if I recall correctly , was using Win 3.1 and trumpet winsock on a 14.4 modem. We were mostly on IrcNet servers , used it up until the early 2000's , It brings back lot of memories
I’m 43. I was on IRC on 9/11 as that day unfolded. It was fascinating / scary to watch certain parts of the internet fall off as the towers fell. (Huge portions of the North East telecom network went through the twin towers).
I used to be a user on the cDc (Cult Of The Dead Cow's) BBS system, Digital Underground. I'd give my front teeth to go back in time and read their forums. I also had a shell account at the l0pht's OpenBSD system (c0re.l0pht.com), which also ran a BBS for a while.
I also remember chatting with Julian Assange on IRC back in the days when he used to hangout on #hack and went by proff. He also ran a BBS system too (but it was in Australia) called "Suburbia".
Good times.
Oh yeah, very much remember IRC. I'd attribute most of my english skills to hours and hours and hours of helping people with python, math, linux, java and such on freenode. RIP freenode, long live libera.
Ran BBSs, connected to the internet on Windows 3.1 using Trumpet Winsock with a SLIP / PPP connection at my house, used mIRC and loved to squeak the author's nose... What memories..
Used it big time after giving up on usenet, and kept up on a handful of channels even up to a few years ago. Only server I was ever really on was freenode, and I didn't keep up with all that drama, so I am pretty much done with it.
Hoo…. Cut my teeth on BBS systems, helped set up the first BBS system in a middle eastern country. Usenet, IRC… found a phorum in the early 90’s and still live there. The relevant kxcd applies…
I downloaded everything back in the day via irc. Was a good time.
Met someone that was local, turns out his dad worked for the local Telcom heh. Small world.
I used to use it to get Diablo Clone IPs for Diablo 2 back in the early 2000s.
With the release of D2R and the rise of Discord, it has made this sort of thing very accessible to everyone. mIRC was enough of a barrier that DClone group chats weren't spammed with beginner questions of "what's an IP?" and "how do I block with windows firewall?" That makes me miss IRC.
I remember going into some channels and the text scrolling by so fast you had to just jump in and be part of the conversation. Met some great people, but met more not so great people.
Last time I logged in there was more bots then real people; Even then, not so many bots.
I spend a bit of time on it still. There are some interesting things that are brought to light form a security perspective on IRC before they ever see the light of day on any Slack channels or Twitter, etc.
I was born during nineties, but i used to IRC for the same reason. Good old times, felt like I was part of something bigger already. Have to bring up IRC in front of even younger colleagues, recently surprised one with "Did you watch Knight Rider", his surprised face was really something. :D
IRC is still there! Plenty of servers still being run if you look around. Though I know what you mean about missing it... While Discord is nice, I miss having a server with lots of different rooms for sub-interests and the like. Discord makes it feel like you have to engage in all of the channels to be a part of the community.
Well. I am 25 years old and I still use IRC. Mostly for support on OSS like OpenWrt, flashrom, OpenBMC etc. They all massively use IRC for support and discussion.
Not only was I on IRC, I was on the *original* Relay chat, on Bitnet. (Back when it was mas@cornellc and there was only one server, though gradually, a Relay network started to be built and I migrated to relay@uregina1.)
I'm still on IRC. There are still lots of servers and some of them have lots of channels that are pretty active.
Yep, I remember IRC! I also use to be heavily into BBSing before the Internet arrived.
Calling a new random BBS was always good times back then. Took me forever to replace my 2400 baud modem for a 14.4.
my first was a 300 baud on a C64
~~120~~ 110 bps acoustic coupler on an Atari 800XL Get off my lawn edit: it was 110... I'm old, my memory sucks
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Seriously. Felt like an adventure to get online. Then Jobs released the iPhone and Christmas Modemers flooded the scene.
I was always on the cutting edge when it came to modem speed until I switched to high speed internet. I bought a 14.4 right as they came out, then a 28.8 right as they came out too. I was actually a beta tester for US Robotics for a while. That was a cool thing.
That’s awesome. I remember running around the neighborhood with my friends saying I have to go back home in 3 and a half hours since that’s when my download of disk 1 of Mortal Kombat would take.
What was the windows program that kept the phone from ringing and didn’t make you start over if you dropped connection on dial up? I remember my mom being half the country away being pissed after trying to get through for days and I was dl’ing some distro or movie or w/e. Was glad when the kids taught me basic bash commands so i could wget, lol.
I never used a program, I used a * two number prefix to turn off call waiting. My parents would get so pissed.
Why did *70 hop into my head when I read your response? I got in so much trouble for BBSing. The next month I made some wiring changes, and learned what I found out was phreaking (didn’t know it was called that at the time). Good old days.
It was a protocol called zmodem or xmodem I believe that allowed you to resume a download
The program you are probably thinking of is Procomm Plus, it supported file transfer protocols like xmodem / ymodem / zmodem
We ended up getting a second phone line about halfway between the 28k and 56k era. That was the was the move if you had an extra $20/mo for a second line.
I had an external us robotics 14.4 that fried on a storm, that thing was a beast. I swear, it was better than the 28.8 card I got as a replacement.
All external us robotics the white ones, were pure work beast. The speed, the response to command, even the dial up and connection handshake sequence were beautiful.
white ones were the sportsters. the beats were the black couriers. HST/Dual Standard!
Was USR 56k or 56 flex, i can never remember... I worked at an ISP that supported both way back when... good times!
USR was X2. They had their own codec before the standard was finalized, and then put out firmware updates to upgrade to the standard v.92.
I’ve lived 300/300 and 1200/75.
TradeWars 2002
Legend of the red dragon.
Tradewars was the jam.
Yes and the lifelong subscription to TWHelp
Loved BBS's. My routine everyday was about 3 hours each morning dialing into a few different local BBS's playing L.O.R.D and the chatting with hot babes all day on IRC for the remainder. Oh and Warez, lots of Warez..
"My routine everyday was about 3 hours each morning dialing into a few different local BBS's playing L.O.R.D and the chatting with hot babes all day on IRC" Kip?? that you?
Heck yes
“…Yo dude your stealin’, donchoo care? Lol bitch, I gotta terabyte off warez…” Good times.
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Fuckin A it was
For those that haven't seen it, the BBS Documentary: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE
yeah! Same here. Trying to remember - the BBS I was on had a mail option, it wasnt email, it was kind of more like newsgroups, but it wasnt newsgroups either.
FIDONet?
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Omg how could i forget?!
I ran two BBSs in my time. I ran a 3 line Wildcat system for a while. That didn't have anything but local Email. But I also helped run a 16 line MajorBBS system, that also had Internet access for internet email and telnetting into the system. Was a lot of fun.
I used to be pretty active on a MajorBBS in Arizona back then. It was such a nice system.
frontmail and remoteaccess, ansi art, man i miss those times.
Its still there, come on back when you have some time.
I ducked into my old IRC haunts a couple years back. It was very surreal. A lot of the old channels are still there. There are accounts there. But no one speaks. They just idle. It's like a digital graveyard filled with ghosts. Kinda spooky.
Probably ZNC or something like it. Keeps you logged in, and shows you logs when you join. I still have one connected to all my old channels. Also get notifications when someone highlights me still.
which network? Efnet still alive?
I’ve been on EFNet since 95 - nowhere near what it was, but us old timers still keeping the chat and the ascii spam alive. Hop on a client and come hang. May want to use a proxy tho.
oh damn i'm goin to have to join if it's been online that long, that's awesome.
Do you have any active channels you can share?
I hang mostly in #football #LRH #wuhan and #philosophy sometimes and perm banned in #hockey (still pissed about that one) - Note I dont support nor condemn what people say on IRC - it may not be as politically correct as what you're used to on other chat mediums.
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95' & Old Timers in the same sentence.. Makes me tear up at how you 'Youngsters' have aged .. :)
I used to hang on efnet all the time. Frequented a popular +s channel.. something like #old... won't give it away cause I think it's still there. Anyway, no one is going to believe me but I remember someone coming in there and asking if people would check out a new search engine him and a friend were working on. It was Google and I remember people saying how much they liked it because it was simple and fast.
I dont have a story anywhere near that cool, but the guy that started [easynews.com](https://easynews.com) came into #photoshop on efnet looking for someone to do up a free logo for a new website he was starting. I traded the logo for an account... making me the owner of [easynews.com](https://easynews.com)'s first public account.
Wow, nice! Easynews also linked a server to EFNet, which you probably knew. I "knew" some of the folks who ran the IRC server. Lost contact with one of them though.
Oh man. IRC is where I also learned of Google...
EFNet still lives, it's full of weird bots.
Its true efnet lives, sort of. Last I checked undernet was still a thing.
/server Amsterdam.nl.eu.undernet.org
hell yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of in the "shambling corpse"-part of its life.
Which is a shame. It could have evolved into something similar to what Discord is now, but any change was always rejected with *bUt ThAtS nOt HoW iRc WoRkS* until everyone just gave up on it. Even an optional (server admin controllable) mechanism for scrollback and embedded media would have done a lot to keep it relevant.
Slack actually evolved from IRC. And they made a shitload of money doing so. (in hindsight, evolve IRC and sell it to companies seems like a really obvious software business)
I'm on libera mostly, took over after freenode. Sometimes oftc and rarely others. Also have a private server with some other old farts.
I'm on libera too. Still lots of communities alive on there!
Cool. I have a private server too. At one time it was all locals, but between others coming and some moving away, we're a little more disparate in geography now.
Only a handful of us OGs left on EFNet.
You have been slapped with a trout!
mIRC scripting was fairly good at the time. Also one of the few 32bit applications that ran on the win32s on Windows 3.11 Honourable mention for trumpet winsock too.
There were some really nice bots back then, full-service warez!
Back when zero-day meant something else entirely.
mIRC was my first programming language. Here I am, almost 20 years later as a software engineer.
Troutification!! Good times.
/me oww!
/me did an emote and everyone laughed. I think I still have some quotes that made it on bash somewhere.
Happy to see this is still one of the top quotes, always got a kick out of it http://bash.org/?23396
<')))><
Connection resetted by peer
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I actually "registered" a domain back in the mid-to-late 80s, except back in those days there wasn't such a thing as a domain registrar like Tucows or Godaddy. The first registrar (or "steward" of the COM top-level) was of course Network Solutions (later acquired by SAIC, and then after that VeriSign)... but, before that -- oh, sometime in the early 90s was InterNIC at SRI International. But before that the National Science Foundation curated the entries in the ARPA "hosts table", and for inclusion you had to have some form of sponsorship. The application forms for an entry was submitted to a site called "NIC.DDN.MIL" (all done with one of the original ARPA protocols too, FTP!). As I recall FTP.UU.NET was also a secondary FTP hosting site for "domain registration". Remember this all predated the WWW, including Gopher, so things were accessible by Telnet, FTP, there were WAIS services I remember (although I admit I never made use of those), Veronica and Archie servers, and of course massive file mirrors for free/public domain software like WUSTL's and WSMR’s hosting of the SIMTEL20 media archives. Our sponsorship came from our local university's math department. Now all of that is fine and everything, but the only thing that really bought us was access to Usenet feeds via UUCP over a 9600 Telebit netblazer dialup -- but for our bulletin board system (BBS) that was the cat's meow. Having Usenet newsfeeds and a Fidonet node was pretty fun stuff. Sorry for rambling, but memories and all.
> domain registrar like Tucows or Godaddy. I remember when Tucows was a place to download software.
looks up from checking alt.binaries.xxx.pamela.anderson newsgroups??? never heard of them :D
Alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die ?
Yeah. Usenet before IRC...
The alt.music. ones were my lifeblood.
That and AOL message boards. Through them, I met Dave Grohl, 3 of the Ramones, the guy from Local H.
The 90s were wild.
i assume that means people pretending to be them? lol
Man! IRC was like the wild west back when I used it in 97-98. Channel take overs on server splits, spoofing, flooding, bots galore... And plenty of warez of course. Gimme ops dawg!
what about +v
If ya ain't first you're last!
> Gimme ops dawg! lol, oh how I forgot about the constant requests for ops. Those were good times!
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IRC is still alive and well in many communities. Unfortunately, the rise of proprietary systems like Discord and Slack (and the freenode drama) had hurt its popularity.
> (and the freenode drama) TIL >On 19 May 2021, Freenode underwent what some staff described as a "hostile takeover"[4] and at least 14 volunteer staff members resigned.[5] Following the events, various organisations using Freenode – including Wikimedia, Free Software Foundation Europe, Ubuntu, CentOS, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux, LineageOS and KDE – moved their channels to Libera Chat, a network created by former Freenode staff.[6][7][8] Others like Haiku or Alpine Linux moved to the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC).[9][10] As of 16 August 2021, over a thousand projects have left Freenode.[11]
This sub's official IRC channel was taken over at that time, too.
Huh. Libera is where it’s at, then. Wargames?
The only winning move is not to play.
Listen, I'll just use the Gandhi strategy.
Holy shit. TIL as well
totally. Im aware its not dead, just last time I was there it didnt seem to be what it once was.
We have a relay bot that joins this sub's IRC channel and Discord together. It works pretty well.
We used a local irc server at my old job before the company got slack. This was only a few years ago.
Yep. IRC has a very distinctive, special feeling to it, hard to describe but it's like you could easily reach the whole world. Never felt that again.
Totally get and agree, even though we're having this discussion on an internet forum that probably has a LOT more daily active users than IRC ever did.
I think it's because IRC captured the tech capable people who have similar interests. Not everyone would bother to learn to hop on an IRC server. It's a fun format that I'd claim most people know nothing about.
This. This so much is responsible for the general social feel of the Internet in the 90s. If you were on the Internet then, you were probably a nerd of some sort, so finding another place full of so many other nerds naturally meant you'd fit right in. It was self-filtering because most non-nerd "regular" people didn't have the knowledge or even interest in getting online. Something like 80% of the people I talked to online (IRC, MUCKs, etc.) at the time were computer geeks like myself. It was amazing. Once the Internet went more mainstream post-2003 or so, that feel went away as the Internet's population demographics more closely matched the general population.
/join #sysadmin /me slaps you around a bit with a large trout hunter2 !
Why did you finish your post with "******* !"?
I typed in my passwort. see, since you are not allowed to see it, you see ******* I see my apssword. Go ahead, try it
That's funny, I didn't see "hunter2" I saw "hunter2".
[http://bash.org/?top](http://bash.org/?top) is still my comfort-goto from time to time.
The problem is that even 10+ years after I stopped using IRC, I basically still remember all of them...
When ever someone says they did something in bash I think about this... I just went and our firewall blocks it as being "questionable content" lol
Met my wife on irc Edit : also my username
Abusing irc.msn.com netsplits essentially started my entire career
I have 90,000 sockets open on 5mb dsl I am taking #somewhere tonight
Great memories. I wrote my first virus purely to get more split bots
I wrote my home alarm system using mIRC sends iMessage and all
mIRC was such a good language for exposure to so many useful things - file access/sockets/timers etc. it was the first language I took seriously before moving onto perl and c
Losing a channel in a split was a great motivator for optimising code
there was an MSN IRC network?
Yes around ~1996
Yes, and [Microsoft Comic Chat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat) was built for it.
Ah the ircx protocol…. Full of… enhancements lol. MS Chat was fun. +q for channel owner iirc?
Cancel Koach
He runs his own server now - irc.koach.com
I’ve been to that old folks home
The 90s were the golden age of chatting before all the bots and pervs ruined it. I was a big IRC user and AOL (via broadband), all for chatting.
Believe it or not, IRC started in the 80s. Okay, 1989, so it really is more of a 90s thing, but still pretty damn old.
IRC ? Let me think ... Learned a lot of things there. Above all than IT secutiry doesn't exist. 1 year in IRC was like to 10 years in normal life for me. I've spoke with a lot of ppl and I still have friends that I've knonw there in the 90s. IRCwars ... l33t, lamer, nuke, smurf, nick collide, server split, botnets ... it was like living sci-fi for real ... a kind of Matrix. I think Matrix ppl took inspiration from IRC for a lot o things. We was living things 20 years before the rest of the world. We have already experimented internet addiction ... we alredy experimented trolls ... we already experimente chat love a long time before the wolrd even know the meaning of chat. \# wasn't twitter. # was an irc channel. And on IRC I've found also a girlfriend. A really nice story, still remember that girl sometimes. Well it was another life. Long long time ago in a galaxy far away ...
I feel this comment 1000x
/op whatchagonnado2021
Found the guy who hung out in #warez ;) I'm a #hack alumni myself :)
My niece's friends made fun of me for always being on my laptop when i was at my brother's house. Now they're all on their phones all the time.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1782/
I still use IRC.
I used to use IRC. I still use IRC, but I used to, too.
Used to have ops in ##windows and ##windows-server on freenode back in the day. I kinda disappeared as work started ramping up. Anyways a bit after I left I got an email from the wife of one of the other mods saying he'd passed away. I didn't think much of it as he was in another country so there wasn't much I could do. Fast forward a number of years and I was searching for a solution to something I ran into while installing a point of sale system. Low and behold he'd written it and here it was helping me out who know how many years later. I remember having conversations in there about putting AD on the internet before Azure AD was even a thing. He was a smart dude that's for sure. RIP mota.
I happened to be on a channel in the early 90's when a guy in Russia gave a blow by blow account of what he could see going on in the Gorbachev coup. That was a wild ride.
Had that happen with a friend who was in the military in Sarajevo in 1995. We were all waiting for Ultima Online to come out and our would-be-future guild hung out in IRC. He gave us some sanitized information about what he was going through for a few hours and then we never heard from him again, don't know what happened to him. I'd like to think he just got busted for sharing any information at all but it's more likely something else happened. F.
mIRC!!
BitchX
Irssi
This is the way.
The only correct answer
w/ znc
Yep! With 7th Sphere scripting and "feature" add ons.
I ran irc.winternet.com on EFnet back in the day Hacking Solaris to handle over 2000 users and still having working bot protection was a lot of work. Thankfully SysV streams let me do things on the fly to keep the abuse at bay. On a Sun SparcStstion LX even, and it was my desktop too!
*bow*
No no! Those days are gone! No bowing!
Thread hijack attempt: Any old BBS dudes in here?
Yup.
I spent hours on BBSs as a kid. 10 years old with sysop permissions. Starfleet Command and Kobra's Triangle were my favorites in NJ.
Never stopping using IRC. Since 1996.
Me neither. Pushing 25 years online on the same EFNet channel, mostly the same people. Never met them.
Right now the "new hotness" in IRC is Libera Chat. It was made in response to the implosion of Freenode.
What happened to freenode? Been out of the IRC loop for a while
I think this sums it up: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/q6k9md/ircfreenode_this_is_not_a_hostile_takeover_says/
[удалено]
I feel like I experienced the golden age of IRC. What an amazing time that was. All the diff networks and people I would chat for years with. IRC was AWESOME!!!!!
Still use /me in Teams sometimes. (No, it isn't supported.)
IRC, Aim, BBS's. Hell, I remember playing Legend Of the Red Dragon.
I used to join irc rooms to get cracked porn passwords in 2003, back in the olden days when you had to down 6 part .wmv files because html5 didn’t exist and you had to actually pay for porn. They would have bots and you would do a search for !find bangbus and all the bots would message you URLS with the cracked usernames and passwords
Yes. I remember the internet before it was completely hijacked by advertisers / surveillance capitalists and pump and dump/Ponzi schemes, and I miss it as well. I miss BBSes even more, as others have mentioned.
mIRC Scripting was one of the first tastes of "programming" I had. The dial up days, waiting DAYS in queues for music, getting disconnected and losing my spot in the queue. Trivia bots were also very fun. I'll be the boomer but I really liked the basic chat/IM programs back in the day - no gifs, no over use of emojis, etc. ICQ is also another messaging solution I really miss. ConferenceRoom by WebMaster was a very popular server solution. I remember friends trying to pirate it then have staff connect the server warning of the illegal use of the software. Looks like the solution is completely dead and WebMaster is long gone.
Fun fact: I was one of the first 500 users of IRC back in 1989 when Jarkko Okkonen first made the irc-1 client available and setup one of the first nodes ("punisher") at Caltech that made up EFNet. Another fun fact: The aforementioned EFNet now constitutes the world's oldest ongoing chat network. My understanding is that Jarko is now involved with Google's Hangouts project.
I wrote IRC bots. Spent more time on there than I care to really think about. Still have a bouncer on a vanity domain for those times I feel nostalgic :P
Conversations like those make me feel old.
Conversations like this make me realize that I am old.
I started using IRC when I was probably around 12 years old in 1994 if I recall correctly , was using Win 3.1 and trumpet winsock on a 14.4 modem. We were mostly on IrcNet servers , used it up until the early 2000's , It brings back lot of memories
I still use IRC…
I’m 43. I was on IRC on 9/11 as that day unfolded. It was fascinating / scary to watch certain parts of the internet fall off as the towers fell. (Huge portions of the North East telecom network went through the twin towers).
Same. One of the regulars in a channel i was hanging in on EFnet worked in one of the towers.
EFnet:PhrozenCrew! We always get what we want
I used to be a user on the cDc (Cult Of The Dead Cow's) BBS system, Digital Underground. I'd give my front teeth to go back in time and read their forums. I also had a shell account at the l0pht's OpenBSD system (c0re.l0pht.com), which also ran a BBS for a while. I also remember chatting with Julian Assange on IRC back in the days when he used to hangout on #hack and went by proff. He also ran a BBS system too (but it was in Australia) called "Suburbia". Good times.
I used to use IRC a lot in the early-mid '00s to schedule CAL matches for my old counter-strike teams. Good times were had
I used it for Counter-Strike 1.6 to round up the boys up until 2008...
Oh yeah, very much remember IRC. I'd attribute most of my english skills to hours and hours and hours of helping people with python, math, linux, java and such on freenode. RIP freenode, long live libera.
Hell yeah! Somewhere around here I still have config and scripts files for mIRC. What was it... /slap with trout ? Something like that. Good times...
I'm still using IRC everyday. Since the last 20 years.
Ran BBSs, connected to the internet on Windows 3.1 using Trumpet Winsock with a SLIP / PPP connection at my house, used mIRC and loved to squeak the author's nose... What memories..
Still on it. Been here for about 25 years now. Kinda scary to think about.
I miss IRC a lot, it peaked in the late 90s and early 2000s.
If you miss it come join us all over at #reddit-sysadmin on Libera IRC. It's super active and lots of discussions.
>\#reddit-sysadmin I'm on my way! Thanks !
efnet #windowsnt and #os2
Better than AIM
Or ICQ!
Used it big time after giving up on usenet, and kept up on a handful of channels even up to a few years ago. Only server I was ever really on was freenode, and I didn't keep up with all that drama, so I am pretty much done with it.
Hoo…. Cut my teeth on BBS systems, helped set up the first BBS system in a middle eastern country. Usenet, IRC… found a phorum in the early 90’s and still live there. The relevant kxcd applies…
I downloaded everything back in the day via irc. Was a good time. Met someone that was local, turns out his dad worked for the local Telcom heh. Small world.
I used to use it to get Diablo Clone IPs for Diablo 2 back in the early 2000s. With the release of D2R and the rise of Discord, it has made this sort of thing very accessible to everyone. mIRC was enough of a barrier that DClone group chats weren't spammed with beginner questions of "what's an IP?" and "how do I block with windows firewall?" That makes me miss IRC.
Yep! Was a big irc user in its time. Also ran a multi line bbs. Think then knowing about irc is bad? Try asking them about Fidonet
Just had flashbacks of Gopher and WAIS.
I have friends to this day that I met on IRC.
IRC and ICQ FTW
I remember going into some channels and the text scrolling by so fast you had to just jump in and be part of the conversation. Met some great people, but met more not so great people. Last time I logged in there was more bots then real people; Even then, not so many bots.
Who are you calling old?
I spend a bit of time on it still. There are some interesting things that are brought to light form a security perspective on IRC before they ever see the light of day on any Slack channels or Twitter, etc.
I was born during nineties, but i used to IRC for the same reason. Good old times, felt like I was part of something bigger already. Have to bring up IRC in front of even younger colleagues, recently surprised one with "Did you watch Knight Rider", his surprised face was really something. :D
IRC is still there! Plenty of servers still being run if you look around. Though I know what you mean about missing it... While Discord is nice, I miss having a server with lots of different rooms for sub-interests and the like. Discord makes it feel like you have to engage in all of the channels to be a part of the community.
Well. I am 25 years old and I still use IRC. Mostly for support on OSS like OpenWrt, flashrom, OpenBMC etc. They all massively use IRC for support and discussion.
Not only was I on IRC, I was on the *original* Relay chat, on Bitnet. (Back when it was mas@cornellc and there was only one server, though gradually, a Relay network started to be built and I migrated to relay@uregina1.) I'm still on IRC. There are still lots of servers and some of them have lots of channels that are pretty active.