About Gamers.IRC
On a late summer day in 1999, Felensis got the first time in touch with mIRC. First he was well enough engaged in understanding the application itself, but pretty soon he familiarized with its scripts and scripting syntax. While he just did some tiny localizations in the beginning, he had become quite familiar with the scripting language within one year. During this process he had coded some scripts for several clans, until the first Gamers.IRC version, beta 5, was released on Nov 18 2000.
In the meantime Felensis got useful support by Sven Matheuszik (sOn) and Jonas Ströbele (Daedalus) as well as some other volunteers who contributed essential things to the success of Gamers.IRC.
Thanks to cs-scene.de, Gamers.IRC got a well-known term in the German gamers‘ world very soon. This collaboration was ended for the benefit of planet-multiplayer.de after a few months, though.
Since April 2003 we have been cooperating with our sponsor www.unitedservers.de very successfully. In October 2010 www.unitedservers.de became a part of core-networks.de. Timely to the 6th anniversary our homepage was relaunched with a completely new design. Thanks to caligula for that.
When Felensis retired because of personal reasons, his team, coordinated by Chris, continued his work. From then on, Sentinel, Tuxman, hybrid666, blk_panther and renato provided powerful support.
Gamers.IRC celebrated its tenth birthday in November 2010 and is still kept up-to-date to cover the newest evolutions on the IRC.
While the number of users on the IRC is currently (2018) stagnating at a comparatively low level (in favor of modern chat applications), the Gamers.IRC team has also shrunk somewhat (Chris, Sentinel, Tuxman). Although the number of updates is declining, Gamers.IRC is the last actively developed complete mIRC script.
Further thanks go to all active and former Gamers.IRC team members. Especially we thank all our users who contributed essential parts to the development by critics, reports and suggestions.
About the IRC
We are all eyewitnesses of the rapid evolution of the World Wide Web. While most people already were in touch with „Web 2.0“ platforms like Twitter and social networks like Facebook, we would like to use this opportunity to remind you of the history and the birth of the internet, the WWW and the IRC:
- 1969: The U.S. Department of Defense runs the ARPANET Project.
- 1982: The internet-related protocols TCP/IP and SMTP are standardized. The first Internet Service Providers (ISP) already exist.
- 1988: The Finnish student Jarkko Oikarinen develops the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol. The chat network will quickly spread from Finland over all the world during the following years. First it was used for entertainment and for sharing opinions, information and data. Later it was obligatory in the gamer scene. Also the humanitarian capacity should be appreciated: Repeatedly the IRC was used during wars as one of the last remaining ways of communication to transfer information and messages.
- 1989: Tim Berners-Lee develops the first web server. This was the cornerstone for the WWW in later years.
- 1990: The ARPANET project is shut down.
- 1992: The world’s first SMS has been sent.
- 1993: Mosaic, the first graphic web browser, is released. However, the 14.4k modem is standard. So loading graphics still requires patience.
- 1995: NSFNET is shut down. This is the signal for the modern, private, commercial internet. Within the next few years most of today’s big internet platforms and search engines arise.
- Feb 28 1995: The first version of mIRC is released.
- 1996: The first instant messaging clients are born (like ICQ).
- 1998: The first internet-capable mobile phones reach the market.
- 1999: People start using the term „web 2.0“. In addition, psyBNC gives you the ability to receive messages on IRC when you’re offline.
- Nov 18 2000: The first Gamers.IRC version is released.
- 2001: Wikipedia is born. Morevoer with TeamSpeak the most well-known in the gaming scene voice chat gets developped.
- 2004: Eventually the „web 2.0“ gains a wider audience. During the next few years a couple of „web 2.0“ services, like Twitter and Facebook, are started; most of them come with an integrated browser chat.
- 2005: The Quakenet reaches with over 240,000 users the unbeaten record of simultaneous active connected IRC users.
- 2006: People start using the term „web 3.0“. The Semantic Web with Artificial Intelligence.
- 2009: WhatsApp and other similar apps appear. The chat from the pocket on the mobile phone. Additional features such as group chat, voice telephony and video telephony put the IRC in the shade of ongoing new developments.
- 2016: „Compared to a well-visited website, that distributes its load across multiple webservers, more than 80000 concurrent visitors, that IRC network freenode currently still has in average (in June 2016), sound not so little. Anyhow… It seems that the Internet Relay Chat has its best times well behind.“
Sources: Wikipedia, irc.netsplit.de