Looks like blogging is a trend now and it spreading fast like a bush fire. Everyone seems to own a blog of their private own domain or either with blogger.com. Either one, blogging is inevitable.

I do somehow remember that back in the 90’s when chatting was the IN thing on the Internet. Every teenagers and working adults were hooked with the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). IRC was the next best thing after the invention of mobile phones. IRC, a free, multi-user chat service, has been connecting people around the globe since 1988. Chatting behind a nickname or a pseudonym was so much easier for people to express their feelings. I guess hiding behind the computer brings out ones true self or it could be the other way round. Thanks to Khaled Mardeam-Bey, the author of mIRC, IRC has become the phenomenal chatting tool used by people of all walks of life till date.

I was once a chatter, hiding behind the nickname dawgbyte. I was one of the pioneer OPs (Channel OPerators) in #mamak channel in UnderNet back in the early 90’s. I soon left UnderNet when the network got heavily hit with DOS attacks. I went over to DALnet in 1996. DALnet was still an infant then but eventually it grew up to be one of the biggest and most popular IRC network around. I too was an OP in #mamak and #malaysia channel. Two of the most famous channels in DALnet and the founder is no other than Terence Goh, or better known as soulblade. I got to know alot of people and made quite alot of friends from DALnet. Some of the famous bloggers now like KY (doubtless), shaolintiger (Low Fu) and Suanie (Suan) are actually chatters and OPerators in #mamak and #malaysia DALnet too. Lately, they are less active in chatting and have move on into blogging.

I’ve learnt alot from IRC. How to nuke, hack channels and run eggdrop bots (yep…I spent some time in IRCnet too). Coming from creative background, IT wasn’t really in my blood so I spent alot of time learning IT gurus. But it was fun back then. Of course, after a while, I grew bored of it and move on into something else.

Nowadays, I hardly see anyone chatting on IRC from CyberCafes. Most of the time you’ll see gamers battling it out against each other in cafes. I guess time have changed. Those days we talked about ShowDown Pro and Peace & Protection IRC scripts. Now we only talk about WordPress and Blogger.com.