Speaking of IRC and the Gulf War, I remember reading somewhere that the US Army was using IRC and at one point it was used to coordinate airstrikes. I don't have a source for this, and it certainly sounds fantastical, but maybe someone here could corroborate it (or refute it decisively).
[comment was deleted as I was replying]<p>> I was introduced to IRC back in 2002 by a Russian girl called Svetlana (lost contact sadly) a few years my senior at a language school I attended that summer. She introduced me to the channel for the Sub7 trojan horse virus. It was there that I first learnt about IP addresses and ports, and pissing my dad off playing around with his (and others’) PC remotely, printing things like. I remember MoSucker being another trojan horse that was popular on the network.<p>> We used to share victims and laugh at what we found them doing. I would hang out on other networks on teen channels posing as a girl, sending .scr ‘slideshows’ of my ‘pictures’. Then there were all the warez channels with 0-day releases and the ability to download directly and quickly.<p>>After quite a few months of script kiddying I was introduced to FreeNode. From there I was introduced to things like Python, FreeBSD, Linux, Emacs, Scheme, SICP, Lisp, Haskell, a free Mathematica subscription, fun mathematics, the idea of going to university abroad, the friend whose house I’m at right now and much more.
Obviously there are other sources for this kind of thing these days, but I do look back on that period quite fondly, and cannot imagine where I would be without the people I came across on IRC. I still go back to FreeNode if I ever need some quick help, but I can’t imagine spending my hours hanging out on IRC anymore. Things have changed.<p>My experience mimics your own. It’s surprising how “closed” computer science was to British teenagers in 2003-2010, computing was reduced to Microsoft Access/Excel and word.<p>But the skiddy hacker groups were always so willing to teach to those who wanted to listen, which led me to open source, which is similar but a lot less forgiving than I remember the old hacker groups.
IRC user for 23 something odd years, no real replacement for real-time chat. I know many substitutes have come along such as discord and whatnot but I’ve never seen the need to use any of them.
I got my first IT job through IRC. A friend whom I knew only through Internet (and who also got his first job through IRC) invited me for a job interview (I think I was the only one who they interviewed).
Prehistory: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET_Relay" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET_Relay</a><p>We called it just 'Relay' as I remember it. A much smaller world than IRC today, mostly students with a scattering of university IT workers.