A tale of IRC

With the #Moncton reunion party coming up in under 2 weeks, I thought I would sit down and share some of my more fond memories of the good ole IRC days. For those of you that have known me since the #Moncton days, some of this will be familiar. For those of you who don?t know what IRC and #Moncton were all about, this will enlighten you a bit.

Now, if I sit back and really think hard about it, I think the first online chat service I ever used, when I first accessed the internet, was actually IRC. For those of you who aren?t familiar with IRC, it?s basically an online chat community where you join chat rooms called chat channels. When I first discovered IRC, I went around to various channels talking to people that I didn?t know, from all over the world. However, as I recall, it was a sort of combination of sheer boredom, and a sense of community, that brought me, Red (Kelly Zwicker) and Moonman (Chris Mneuier) together one fateful night on IRC.

If I remember right, back in those days, there was no #Moncton channel (all channels on IRC start with the # symbol). I can?t remember exactly how we met up, but I remember somehow having a conversation in some regard with this woman named Red. I also talked to this guy named Moonman. Somehow, we all ended up in a channel called #Moncton since we were all a part of Moncton. In those days, we didn?t have much else going on so chatting online was something new and interesting so we spent a fair amount of time just chatting on #Moncton.

After awhile, more people became aware of this place and it grew. Eventually, we would throw the very first #Moncton IRC party at Fat Tuesday?s on Main St.

I remember this very vividly because it was incredibly lame and there was only a few people there. Red, Moonman, I think Nova was there, and Dale. It basically consisted of us sitting at a long table, talking about useless crap we talked about online.

That lead to another IRC party that went over much better. Dale lent us the use of his house and a lot of IRC?ers showed up. Typhoon, Forposter (hehehe), Megz, Master_C, Phidelt, CKU, Bus_Rider, and I?m sure others that escape me at the moment.

For some of you, you might be thinking that it would be a room filled with a bunch of geeks, but it was far from it. We were all relatively normal people with regular lives. That party was a lot of fun and oddly enough, actually led me to my first online relationship. That of course went nowhere, but it did show possibilities that I had never considered before.

There were other parties. One at The Centennial Beverage Room where we played a pile of pool, and made fun of the folks from Infodog and their pathetic banners. A lot of people got drunk and had a blast.

I threw a party at mom?s place and had a pretty decent sized crowd. I believe I have several photos from that party and was in fact the first time I met my now ex-wife, Jenn who was then known as dally. I remember that specifically because I took one look at her and thought she was like 10 years old when she was actually in college. Funny stuff looking back now. But we all had a blast.

Trish (who?s IRC name escapes me now) through a couple of very nice parties at her house. Between her and Nova?s relationship, we managed to pull off some very nice parties where apparently there was some seriously nasty sex going on in her bathroom. That led to the infamous video camera that was placed in there for the next party, so that there would be no sex in the bathroom. I recall being dumped at one of those parties and I wasn?t even there. I just delivered the free pizza. Ahhhh the good ole Greco days. Apprently that was also the party with a lot of whoring around, candy necklaces, and a major drunkfest ending with the cops showing up at some point.

The last major IRC party for #Moncton was held at my home. In those days, CKU was dating a guy named Steve, AKA _Slayer_ who was from San Diego. He had come down to visit her and we through a big bash at mom?s house. This would be the last major party for #Moncton during my reign as the so-called leader of #Moncton. See, in those days, for whatever reason, I had become a sort of leader to the group of folks in that channel. I was always trying to settle fights, maintained the web pages, and even helped protect the channel (when I could) from other parties. I also used the channel for my own malicious duties in those days (more later). I tend to be a sort of diplomat on many levels so I think that?s why people always came to me. Regardless, the last party I had would be one of the largest. Over 70 people showed up at mom?s (although not all at the same time, but many) and it went well into the early hours of the morning. This is in fact the only IRC party that I actually have on videocassette. There is a videotape here in my computer room which contains about 2 hours of footage from that party. I do think I?ll have to play that on the 13th for us to get a good laugh. That ought to be funny to watch as I was between Jessica and Jenn in those days. Hahahaha. Man, that will be funny to see. That party saw a lot of drunks, no real damage to the house, but some puking and screaming by some of the visitors, and me driving one home.

#Moncton was a lot of fun. Me and Chris actually used that channel as a basis for a lot of underhanded activity. At our peak, we could take over other channels, use hacker-style tools to lock up and drop anyone on a computer, and even cause IRC servers to split. The most memorable of those was the use of botnets. Basically, bots are users that appear on IRC but are actually just a program that appears as a user. When you link a lot of these bots together, you could have all of them act as one logical bot, and flood someone off of IRC. I even wrote a script in Linux so that if someone entered the channel that I didn?t like, it immediately sent a pile of attacks to that persons computer, causing it to either blue screen, or freeze solid. God bless ?ding.tcl?. It worked like a charm.

So what happened? As I recall, it was some time in either late 1998 or early 1999 where I sort of got fed up with dealing with #Moncton. I had done a lot of work, and really just didn?t want to bother anymore. Some of the things that went on there, at that time, were just useless crap. The channel still exists today but is nothing like it was during its heyday. Durng it?s peak, we actually had Infodog giving us free web space and were looking into developing a sort of Moncton hub website. I even wrote the basics of an IRC based treasure hunting game that never got released. I still have the code there and the basics are very simple but it would have been a cool tool. I also can definitely take credit for a piece of code that I wrote that was inspired by #Moncton. In those days, you had no way to interface the web with IRC. Now, you can use java, but then java didn?t exist. I actually wrote a script that copied all of the data from an IRC channel, and sent it to a webpage, so you could view the channel, in almost real-time (15 second delay usually) to see what was up. Very nicely done with the limited resources.

IRC. It was a lot of fun and I met a lot of nice people. Spawned three relationships and one marriage. All of which failed but not because of the way we met, but just because of the way life was. I still speak to some of the folks from IRC, and in fact, some of you reading this are people I have met and know because of IRC and I?m glad for that.

With that said, I am hoping that our get together on the 13th will be a lot of fun, and we can at least shoot the shit on old IRC stories, and get a good laugh out of the old video sitting here on my desk.