login
my descent into IRC (pt. 1) posted: Tue 2011-11-01 21:24:43 tags: n/a
In Sept. 1993 or '94, I'm thinking '94, I attended my first "blind party" with people I had previously known only via the Internet. I had found a cyberhome in AOL's "chat rooms", in a stable community of unstable people styled "Type Your Brains Out" (TYBO). I drove down to Fredericksburg, VA in my aged Buick Riviera to meet up with them at a Best Western. (Same one that's still on Plank Rd.?)

At the time, AOL charged some flat subscription rate per month but, here's the catch, after 20 or 25 hours they surcharged an additional per-hour rate. This was not very wallet-friendly, so after a few months of $100+ AOL bills some of us splintered off to "real" Internet service providers (in my case, concentric.net, aka concentric.com and cris.com, now an XO.com brand) and picked up where we'd left off with #Amish_Rake_Fight (ARF) on undernet or DALnet.

To emulate our previous AOL community message board, one of our more tech-savvy members set up a web-based bulletin board, archives of which still shamble the interwebs.