[ih] Chat room and forum archives

[Ofer Inbar]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2022 at 07:27:24AM -0700,
Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> > IRC use was really disjoint from the world of GEnie/CompuServe/AOL,
> > BBSes, etc.  In 1992 IRC had hundreds of people.  By 1995 it was much
> > bigger, but nearly all of those new people were ones who went to
> > college or worked for computer companies in the early 90s, and were
> > introduced to the TCP/IP Internet through their school or work
> > accounts.  It does not sound like this character fits that mold.
> 
> I'm sorry, I think irc was much much bigger than that. I founded an
> isp in 1993 and helped run a cybercafe, and the biggest things by 1994
> were netnews, chat, mail, and web. irc was also used by a lot of bad
> guys. irc had become a thing as early as 1988, I think. As there were

Growth of IRC from 1992 to 1995 was extremely rapid, was my point.
It was still very very small at the beginning of 1992, it as many many
times bigger by 1995.

IRC was created in 1998 by Jarkko Oikarinen when he was an undergrad
(freshman, I think) at University of Oulu.  It was used mostly by
Finns in the first few years.  When I got on IRC in January 1990 (when
Brandeis got its first 56K link to NEARnet) it was still majority
Finns, but was starting to catch on in the US.  Somewhere in my old
email or irc log archives I might be able to find when the irc.wedding
was that was the first time more than 100 people were on IRC at the
same time, but it was either late 1990 or early 1991 I think.  By late
1991 having 3-digit user totals was the norm during US daytime.

September 1993 was the notorious long September that either lasted 5-7
years, or never ended, depending on who you talk to and how they define
it.  From that point, a lot more universities with larger numbers of
students would give everyone Internet access, and that fuelled growth.
IRC in fall 1993 may very well have had an order of magnitude more
people on it than it had at the start of 1993.

But as I said before, the vast majority of the new people were
students or people who worked at computer companies (which were also
starting to hook up to the net in larger numbers around that time.
In 1994 I co-founded a sysadmin consulting company in Boston, and
our first few years the majority of our business was connecting
existing companies' existing computer networks to the Internet.
  -- Cos