Creator of Relay On BITNET, Predecessor of IRC, Dies (blogs.com) 34
tmjva writes: Jeff Kell passed away on November 25 as reported here in the 3000newswire. He was inventor of BITNET Relay, a predecessor of Internet Relay Chat using the REXX programming language.
In 1987 he wrote the following preserved article about RELAY and here is his obituary. May this early inventor rest in peace.
In 1987 he wrote the following preserved article about RELAY and here is his obituary. May this early inventor rest in peace.
No Relay to Great Beyond (Score:5, Insightful)
Goodbye and thank you Jeff, wherever you are.
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smsg rscs cmd ....
what fond, fond memories ...
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In our sad, PC world.
And not the PC that we have instead Amiga
oh no! (Score:2, Funny)
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Afaik irc is still fairly popular. I figure cable tv will go first.
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What IRC needs is social media integration. And the possibility to login with your Facebook or Google+ account. *Ducks*
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The college students I work with all seem to be on Snapchat and Skype - mostly at the same time. The only people I know who are on IRC are unix sysadmins - that's their social network.
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IRC is still very popular with open source software developers. Many open source projects have channels on freenode or elsewhere.
What does seem to have vanished is the days of connecting to an IRC server to pull down pirated crap (BitTorrent and p2p killed that off)
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I quit using IRC about 15 yrs ago because it was the same shit over and over again.
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I quit using IRC about 15 yrs ago because it was the same shit over and over again.
You might as well kill yourself, because life is more than a bit samey, too. Every day I get up, take a shower, make breakfast... I could go on but isn't the point made? Admittedly, I don't irc any more either, but that's because I get the same shit over and over again from social networking and no longer need irc.
predecessor? (Score:1)
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"A model or type of machinery or device which precedes the current one. Usually used to describe an earlier, outdated model." Seem entirely appropriate.
Incorrect headline (Score:5, Informative)
As is all too common these days, both the summary and article are right, but the headline is wrong. Jeff Kell did not invent BITNET [wikipedia.org] (Because It's Time NETwork or Because It's There NETwork). BITNET was developed in the early '80s by Ira Fuchs of CUNY and Greydon Freeman, Inc. of Yale. It was an early store and forward network based on IBM protocols.
Both the summary and article correctly credit Jeff with the invention of BITNET RELAY which was a predecessor of IRC. It was important, but was just a component of BITNET.
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Yo! Schmuck! Read it AGAIN and weep!
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When I submitted the article, it was about inventing RELAY on BITNET. Not BITNET itself. Did not mean to confuse.
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Dumbass trolls haven't even realized the domain expired and its a landing page.
Oh, fond memories! (Score:1)
Back in ye olden times, fond memories of hours lost at a green serial terminal, TALKing to peope all over the world.
When things worked solely by agreement, i.e. if you registered your nick at some server (IIRC NICKSERV), it was yours, and nobody touched it.