After 25 years, I still love Undernet, and I still chat there every day. Most of the friends I made back in the 90s aren't around anymore, but I still get to meet new and interesting people all the time, and I love the group of amazing friends I have there today. And it was one of them who suggested this project...
Now, I grew up in a rural area of the southern US, and I had never been out of the South, but on Undernet, I met people in other states, other countries, even other continents! I made friends all over the world and learned a great deal about other cultures and ideas. And for the first time, I met other people who were into my new favorite hobby — programming — and that set me on the path to becoming a software engineer. So much of who I am can be traced back to the people I met on Undernet.
These days, there are hundreds of IRC networks, and I'm on several of them. But when I was a kid growing up in the 90s, the only network I used was Undernet .
Due to the simple, text-based protocol, it's incredibly easy to develop software to work with IRC. When I started learning how to code as a kid, all of my programming projects were IRC-related. Bots, clients, servers, games, everything! One of my games even became quite popular. If you're an IRC user, you've probably heard of the Idle RPG .
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat . Invented in the late 1980s, it's one of the oldest and most popular realtime chat protocols. Despite being over 30 years old, it's still actively developed, and hundreds of thousands of people still use it to chat every day.
Well, I guess this isn't going away. Time to get to work.
This is five days later! Five days! That's like, a year in IRC time.
OK, but they are just trolling, right? If I just ignore this, they will forget about it, RIGHT??
Hard to believe this joke is still going the next day. This is a joke, right?
Empus is a nut, so obviously I think this is all a big joke. But later that day...
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