Good technology never gets old

I still recall the first time I were introduced to IRC – Internet Relay Chat – at my local school. It must have been around 1993 and we had to sit on the Library to use the internet.

It was pretty cool to be able to chat with people around the world and even being able to “own” my own chat channels that people could join.

Back then we primarily used the EFnet servers but moved to Undernet a few years later due to EFnet starting to block users/channels for various reasons (mostly due to people sharing  Warez in channels etc) .

Happy Birthday

Today I realized that IRC turns 30 years old around this month. It was started as a student-summer-project by Jarkko Oikarinen  who wanted to replace the existing chat system MUT on the local university in Oulu, Finland. Within a few years the source code were released to the public and the rest is history.

At the peak period around 2003-2004 there were more than 10 million simultaneous users on IRC networks. These days we are just short of 500.000 users at best (including me!).

So Happy Birthday IRC – 30 years is no age for a great system like this!

Also Happy Birthday Freenode.net that turned 20 years old a few month back (it actually started in 1995 as linpeople.org but turned into freenode.net in 1998)

You can still find me on freenode.net under the username KimuSan^ – look in channels like #cryptoparty-dk #linux-dk #vim