19 Jan 2010

IRC

It was 4am and I was making my way home from 24 Hour Internet. That's not the real name of the place. It has a brand and everything, but we name it for the giant flashing neon sign.

I had my iPhone and Tweetie and even at that ungodly hour there were new messages streaming in. On the West Coast it was just just barely 1am - a perfectly reasonable hour to be sharing new blog posts. In Australia, @ballardian was just getting started.

I once spent NYE on IRC wishing people Happy New Year as each time zone ticked over. Twitter is like that all the time.

IRC was something special. It felt like magic.

I missed out on BBSes entirely. My trajectory went straight from writing essays in WriteNow on Mac System 6 to a telnet login through school.

The first time I was on IRC it was before I'd even enrolled. The brother of a friend snuck me in to one of the Windows labs in the basement of the university library. He showed me enough UNIX to login, launch the client, pick a nickname ("MojoBW") and /join #channels. Understand that I'd never even seen a command line before. I felt like a hacker. Magic.

IRC was thrilling just for the novelty of what we were doing. Text-only instant chat anywhere in the world.

"Where are you from?"
"Germany!"
"Israel!"
"Australia!"

No clue if any of it was true. I had no way to check, no knowledge of what the /whois results meant.

I skipped between channels, switching real names, genders, locations and backstories. You could be anyone on IRC, you could be more than one person at once. All of the seeds that give you phishing, Internet bullying, identity theft, and the like were there and we played with them and were played by them.

I spent a terrifying 48 hours convinced that RCMP special investigators suspected me of terrorism until someone with a better grasp of message headers took a look at the "Received: from" lines.

Over time, IRC became integrated into my regular patterns. I'm still friends with many of the people I met. I'm in touch with even more. I got used to instant text communication with people all over the world. I have a client whose sole purpose is logging me into a half-dozen flavours of text chat at once. I have a dashboard widget whose sole purpose is making it easy to juggle timezones when I set up a meeting. It barely feels weird at all to have a morning conversation cut off because someone else has to go to bed.

My online identity is a lot less fluid now. Just about every account I have ties back to "Tim Maly" and just about everyone I know has told me their real name.

But it still feels good to stay up until all hours, chatting with friends I've never met.