www.chatzone.ws

The Beginning of #Chatzone - as told by lag
 
Well, the history of #chatzone would probably be better told by Mmmm than anyone. I'm one of the oldest chatzoners but there are some who've been there longer than myself such as Marvel, red_dog, dicer and a few others.
 
The history of #chatzone goes back to the creation of Undernet. There was a dispute of some kind between Mmmm and another ircop called Barron. I don't recall any of the details, but #chatzone split off from #chat and Barron ended up spending most of his time on EFnet. The whole Undernet project was a split-off from EFnet for that matter. It was supposed to be a friendlier alternative but at the time it was considered something of a joke by the EFnetters. They used to say that Undernet had more servers than users, which was actually true at first.
 
There were only a few channels worth mentioning and #chatzone was the main chat channel for the whole network. Other channels were #wasteland, #chat, and #netsex and those were about the only ones worth mentioning. Out of maybe 200 clients connected to the network a good 40 or so might be on #chatzone. Astonishingly, #wasteland was actually a friendly help channel then, as opposed to the place it is now. The Undernet really was a much friendlier place than EFnet and much of the credit should go to Mmmm for that.
 
Mmmm more than anyone is responsible for the success of Undernet. He promoted Undernet on the newsgroups, wrote an IRC FAQ and answered hundreds of questions both online and on the newsgroups. Another person was WildThang. He and Mmmm were friends at University of Oklahoma and while Mmmm did most of the PR for Undernet, WildThang did a lot of the technical stuff, such as creating Uworld. WildThang also ran a group of telnet clients that defaulted to #chatzone and were responsible for the channel's early success. There were also telnet clients run by dp from the Caen server in France and some telnet clients from University of Vienna. The telnet clients were important at the time since for many people that was the only way they could get on IRC. Otherwise you had to download a client and compile it on a unix box and not everyone had access to a unix box. But anyone with a PC and telnet could get onto IRC with a telnet client.
 
The early #chatzone had a reputation as a really cool place, and it was. At the time most of the people on IRC were college students, professors, and people who had access through work. That's how I discovered it since I work for the military. The military and universities really created the internet, so we were the first people to get to use it. It made for a very educated, sophisticated group of users and #chatzone was a destination of choice. Undernet was better managed than EFnet in a lot of ways, including reduced lag and better handling of netsplits. EFnet could be a war zone since it was easy to ride a netsplit onto a channel and get ops that way. Undernet's server code didn't allow that.
 
There were a group of Brits, mostly from Plymouth University, who regarded IRC as an opportunity to have a lot of laughs. Of that bunch, Smeagle is the only one I've seen lately, but there was a whole group of them at the time and they made #chatzone a rollicking place. It's really never been as fun since those guys left. One of them, lemsip, ended up moving to the states and marrying a woman he met on #chatzone.
 
There was a very dark period in the channel's history that most people have forgotten. What happened was that the telnet clients were shut down (except for the Caens, which I think are still running) and suddenly the place was deserted. I mean, really deserted. Like, a bot-only channel. I was a channel admin at the time and we were knocking our heads out trying to get the channel back to it's popular self. By then there were a lot of competing channels and #chatzone was suddenly out of favor. Celegans and I even staged a flamewar on one of the IRC newsgroups just to get the channel mentioned. Then one of the ops, Snahmy, wrote to the author of mIRC and got us added to the channel listing, and the place was suddenly more popular than ever. What keeps it popular now I can't really say. There are plenty of other channels in the mIRC listing and most of them are nowhere near as popular as #chatzone. One thing is that most of the ops are very experienced and serve as good hosts.
 
Well, I hope this little write up helps a bit. Perhaps you could ask marvel and red_dog to give their account of events as they are both quite verbose and have been on the channel even longer than I. Put that together with an interview with Mmmm and maybe you'll have something.
 
 
-contributed by lag