If the BBS was the internet before the internet had a face, IRC was the internet before it had manners. Internet Relay Chat. EFNet specifically — the original network, the big one, the one where everything happened and nothing was stable and you loved every second of it anyway. I found it in 1995 and it immediately became the center of my online life.
I was 13. My nick was darrell. Not Darr3ll, not d4rr3ll-X, not xX_DaRrElL_Xx. Just darrell. Lowercase, nothing clever, no numbers. Everyone around me was picking handles like they were naming their firstborn and I just typed my actual name. I think at 13 I hadn’t fully grasped that the whole point was to be somebody else online. Or maybe I just didn’t care.
// The Channels
I spent most of my time in a handful of channels. #minnesota and #wisconsin were the geographic hangouts — people from the region, the closest thing IRC had to a local bar. You knew roughly where people were, you talked about things that happened within driving distance, and there was a realness to it that the bigger channels didn’t have. These were the channels where actual relationships formed.
#2600 was different. If you don’t know the name — 2600 Hz was the tone that used to unlock AT&T’s long distance lines, later the name of a hacker magazine that became a cultural touchstone. The #2600 channel on EFNet was where the technically curious gathered. Conversations about systems, security, networking, how things worked and how they broke. Not a crime syndicate — genuinely curious people who wanted to understand technology at a level most people never bothered with. That channel shaped how I thought about infrastructure more than any book or course ever did.
And then there was #oper. Hanging around the IRC operators channel when you’re 13 and very much not an IRCop is either impressive or just brazen depending on how you look at it. That’s where I first encountered some of the people who actually ran EFNet — and where I met Dianora.
*** Connecting to irc.umn.edu (6667) *** Welcome to EFNet, darrell *** There are 47,832 users and 23,541 invisible on 47 servers *** 12,304 channels formed /join #minnesota *** darrell has joined #minnesota /join #2600 *** darrell has joined #2600 *** Netsplit detected: irc.umn.edu irc.colorado.edu *** Signoff: [23 users] (*.net *.split)
// Dianora
Diane Bruce — Dianora on IRC — is legitimately in the IRC Hall of Fame. Not honorary, not a courtesy listing. She earned it. She was an EFNet IRCop, a contributor to the ircd codebase that literally ran the network, and one of the most respected figures in that entire world. She had real power on EFNet and she understood the network at a technical depth that most people never got close to.
And somehow a 13-year-old kid named darrell from the upper Midwest ended up in real conversations with her.
I don’t fully remember how it started — probably #oper, probably me asking something I had no business asking — but it turned into actual conversation. Not mentorship in any formal sense, just two people talking. About the network, about tech, about whatever was going on. She treated me like a person worth talking to rather than a kid to be managed, and that mattered more than I could have articulated at 13. You don’t forget people who do that.
That’s one of the things IRC gave you that nothing since has quite replicated: genuine cross-generational connection built entirely on shared interest. Age didn’t gate-keep you. Either you were worth talking to or you weren’t, and that was determined by what you said, not how old you were or what your bio said.
// Merp
I also met someone who went by merp. I’m not going to go into details that aren’t mine to share, but here’s the thing: we’re still friends. Still talk today. That’s a friendship that started in an IRC channel in 1995 and has outlasted every social network, every platform, every app that has come along since claiming to be the place where real connection happens.
Tell me again how Twitter or Instagram or whatever is next builds community. I’ve got a 30-year friendship that started with a chat client and a 14.4k modem that says otherwise.
// Netsplits, Kills, and the K-Line
EFNet was held together with hope and BGP and was constantly, reliably, entertainingly falling apart. Netsplits were so frequent you could almost set a clock by them. A netsplit is what happens when two parts of the IRC network lose their connection to each other — suddenly half the people in your channel are gone, replaced by a wall of *.net *.split quit messages. Then ten minutes later they’d come back in a flood and you’d spend the next few minutes sorting out who actually said what and who was a ghost.
Getting kicked from a channel was table stakes. Getting banned was a rite of passage. Getting killed — that’s when an IRCop forcibly disconnects you from the entire server, usually with a message that tells you and everyone else exactly why — that was almost an honor. It meant you’d done something interesting enough for someone with server access to personally take the time to deal with you.
The one you didn’t want was the K-line. A kill is temporary. A K-line is a server-level ban — your host or IP gets blocked, and you’re done on that server until someone removes it. On EFNet, getting K-lined by the wrong server could ripple across the network. That was when the fun stopped and you actually had to think about what you’d done.
Getting kicked was entertainment. Getting killed was a story to tell. Getting K-lined was a lesson. Most of us needed all three at least once.
// What IRC Actually Was
People describe IRC as an early chat program, and that’s technically accurate the way describing a library as a room with books is technically accurate. IRC was infrastructure for human connection that happened to be built on a protocol anyone could run a server on. It was decentralized, chaotic, ungoverned in any meaningful corporate sense, and completely real in a way that algorithmic social media has never managed to be.
No feed. No algorithm deciding what you saw. No engagement metrics. No verified badges. No company in between you and the conversation deciding what to amplify or suppress. Just a channel, the people in it, and whatever happened when they talked to each other. The bad actors were handled by other humans — ops, IRCops, server admins — people who were part of the community and had skin in the game.
I was on EFNet as a 13-year-old from Wisconsin who had no business being in half the channels I was in, and I walked away from it with technical knowledge I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else, friendships that are still real thirty years later, and a baseline understanding of how networked communities work that has informed everything I’ve built since.
They don’t build them like that anymore. They should.