I mean that line of thinking predates epoll/kqueue which were still very new and very difficult to reason about, and select/poll sucked ass.

The thing was that was “the thing to do” back then: use a thread per connection because “concurrency.” Because it was better than forking per connection, and people wanted answers besides select/poll, and I don’t think people got accustomed to async thinking. Especially Windows devs. It doesn’t scale of course.

at the time, it was a body blow, but in retrospect, it makes sense that people were upset that i was shoving unproven ircd patches out there and hoping for the best.

they just wanted to a place to chill.

we wanted to improve the software on our IRC network in order to make it more suitable for our needs.

first, we ran unrealircd and epona as most naive IRC network operators did at the time. it was great: you could run both on Windows, despite this being a horrid idea for reliability and scalability.

epona quit being maintained and got forked into anope.

meanwhile, OPN added a feature to dancer-ircd called +q (quiet lists). you could use these to mute people who were being annoying.

so i thought "how hard could it be to add this?", despite not knowing a fucking thing about writing code or anything.

but i toiled and toiled and eventually i hacked this feature into unrealircd.

but i did it in a really stupid way: unrealircd uses +q for "channel owner" mode, but i wanted it to be like OPN's +q instead. so i renamed unrealircd's +q to +y.

needless to say that ircd was buggy as hell because i didn't know what the fuck i was doing.

OPN (which became freenode) became the place for techie stuff, and me and my fellow IRC friends built a succession of IRC networks for everything else we were talking about.

the final iteration of that network being one called staticbox.

the answer is simple, i've known roy since DALnet #slackware.

in late 2002, a new network called Rizon was started by nessun and acidst0rm.

their strategy to gain users was to:

- DDoS DALnet servers
- join the largest channels (which were warez ones) and invite them to use Rizon instead.

because of the disruptions, friends from DALnet created their own networks and #slackware moved to the Open Projects Network which later rebranded to freenode.

but, at that time, slackware directed folks to join #slackware on DALnet for help, so I did. DALnet became a space where I enjoyed hanging out quite a bit, because it was filled with interesting people to talk to.

but... DALnet had a policy of tolerance toward "warez" channels: channels which had XDCC bots in them that you could use to download pirated content.

BitTorrent didn't exist yet, everyone was using either IRC or USENET for that.

a friend of mine in real life was enthusiastic about GNU/Linux and gave me a burned CD with mandrake linux on it. i forget the specific version, it's not important. i eventually settled on slackware, spending allowance money on a money order to buy the official release CD.

i kind of tried to allude to this in my psychoanalysis of the freenode kerfluffle 5 years ago.

in that piece, i found that i could understand andrew lee's motivations quite well.

to borrow a metaphor from final fantasy 9: perhaps andrew lee became IRC's kuja. what he did was wrong (destroy freenode), but his heart was in the right place (preserve IRC).

i would think about things to add to ircd while in school, and since we weren't allowed to have laptops, i would just put it in the notebook, and then type it all in when i got home.

(again, i was a trans kid growing up in oklahoma, without the necessary vocabulary or resources to make that work out)

but *also* do you all remember DMOZ?

in an effort to find the vocabulary to describe how i felt about my identity, i discovered the otherkin and therianthropy communities through DMOZ.

...which led back to IRC anyway.