It’s a small world
As a geeky kid, I was an early-ish user of the Internet. My first experience was on a black and white IBM Thinkpad laptop circa 1995. I still remember looking up the FIFA world football rankings, and it taking several minutes to download the entire list. Of course, back then, on my 14.4kbps PCMCIA modem, that was pretty quick. To this day I still vividly remember using Eudora Light to access email, Netscape Navigator to browse the Web, and most importantly, using mIRC to chat with random people around the world over Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
Between 1996 and 1999 I would spend quite a bit of time on IRC. I would mostly frequent DALnet, and the channels (rooms) I joined were about programming and web development, scripting IRC clients like mIRC and a channel called #ireland for more casual conversation with people in Ireland, people originally from Ireland and people with some remote distant connection with Ireland (read: Americans).
I spent so much time chatting in these places that I would eventually become a channel operator (or op) on several channels. This gives you the power to kick people from the room, ban people and other monumentally important things. Needless to say as a 11–14 year old, this felt pretty good. I’m pretty sure I lost my credentials at least once for getting a bit fast and loose with the kick button.
My precise memory is sketchy but at some point along this timeline, a big argument broke out between the founder of the #ireland channel – a guy with the nickname Heathcliff, and one of the channel SOPs (super operators – yes, they are really called that), an American lady by the nickname smyle. I can’t remember for the life of me what exactly went wrong, but all hell broke loose and the end result was a complete split in the channel. Many ops, myself included, left #ireland and followed smyle in starting the very creatively named #ireland2 channel. I don’t remember many of the others but I do remember a guy called jean-paul (who I believe kept the channel open for many years after most had abandoned it in the 2000s) and also a guy who went by the nickname qball. Despite the absurd name, the channel was much more popular than the original #ireland for quite some time.
qball and I would chat for hours on end. He was a ridiculously talented coder and sysadmin. Through him I became interested in Linux, and later other Unix operating systems like OpenBSD, NetBSD, SunOS and Solaris. He got me into programming, convincing me to learn C amongst other languages. qball was always way beyond me though. I’d be coming to terms with some new unix command and q would be going on about how he’d be using these insane SGi machines running Irix to do all sorts of crazy shit. Occasionally over the years I’d return to see if anyone was still on these channels – q would usually be on #c, and I was saddened to learn that he had died in 2008. In many ways he kickstarted my interest and passion for coding and building software, and inspired me to pursue it as a career.
My favourite IRC story is about another one of my friends from #ireland2. He lived in Lahore, Pakistan and we shared a lot of geeky interests. One day we were chatting and he was excited to tell me that he and his family were moving to Ireland. I asked what part and he said Cork – it really is a small world, I thought, as I lived there myself. Then I asked what part of Cork and he said a place called Frankfield. Turned out he was moving into the same estate I lived in at the time, about 300 yards from my house. My first reaction was that some weird sick person had hacked me and found out where I lived. Amazingly it actually turned out that he really was just a geeky kid from Pakistan who moved from Lahore to 300 yards away from me completely randomly.
We became good friends for a while, but better still I got a great story for any time someone uses the phrase “It’s a small world”. It really, really is.
