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Comment by paulie_a | Hacker News Reader

This did make me nostalgic. More so for the IRC Warez scene. Dalnet, Undernet, Effnet. I spent some time #3dwarez chatting with people sharing cracked copies of software. Many of the people worked in the industry but couldn't afford the 25K licence for personal use. So they traded it around.

I was recently cleaning out some boxes of lost hardware. I kind of hoped I would find an old zip disk that had a copy of the 3D model file for the Titanic movie. Someone from the studio made it available. I think it was a lightwave 3d file and at the time had to download a copy of that just to view it.

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IRC was such an interesting place - vast with a ton of different niches.

I spent a whole summer downloading and burning dreamcast games - to a 14 year old it felt like I'd won the lottery.

All of my gaming friends hung out on IRC as well, on top of stuff like cracked passwords for pay sites , software, and just all the weird niche hangouts like the phreaking channels.

It was a great part of growing up, sometimes I'm tempted to check in and see what's still around but somehow I never get around to it.

IRC is still an interesting place! Even just on Freenode there are a bunch of good channels. It’s not the same as the 90s (before my time online) and 2000s, but I’ve made a few friends & good acquaintances on technical channels, many of whom I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting in person, since many of us live in the SF bay area.

freenode is definitely the useful network these days

Agreed. Freenode is the network I frequent the most. Some of the programming language and framework specific channels are good. As it has always been, IRC can seem like a pretty hostile place to "noobs"; just don't ask to ask and RTFM before you do.

#emacs is usually very helpful and friendly.

I'm still sore about losing the local channel to IM (particularly MSN Messenger, thanks to MS' aggressive bundling) and early gen social networking sites.

> I think it was a lightwave 3d file

Ah, LightWave, where I first learned 3D modeling and VFX. By the way, the core group behind LightWave went on to make Modo, which is now my favorite package for modeling and baking.

Just the term "warez" elicits nostalgia, now add "couriers" and "BBS." Those were the days.

Another thing I happened upon recently was scene.org, pleasantly surprised it's still up. I first visited it back in '96, I think, it was one of the first sites I was eager to visit when I first got online (quite possible I was online as early as '93, but I can't be sure).

https://files.scene.org/browse/parties/

Efnet (Eris-free Network). I am not correcting because I am an asshole but because I think there is a notable difference in how people used to name things in 90s vs now.

For the curious, Eris is the ancient Greek god of strife and discord. Is this an alternate spelling of Ares?

Ares is a deity of war and a male. Eris is a deity of discord and is one of the Ares' two female companions.

Agh, I wish I could list off all the channels I was in without outing myself lol. Those were sick times. :) Best group of hackers I've ever met.

Curious how many people still keep up with their old groups? Did any of you become lifelong friends?

I logged into a channel on Dalnet I used to frequent when I was 16 in 1998 recently. Some of the SAME people were there. Nearly 20 years later.

Have had the same experience on an EFnet channel, wasn't much talking anymore, though. I also used to frequent QuakeNet.

I lost contact with a lot of people. I wish I still had their info from the bbs and irc days. Also several people I knew got busted by the feds.

I used to spend so much time on this topic, never really used IRC though. Or maybe .. I can't recall..

fun anecdote: some guy offered me an access to its ftp, full of tutorials. I didn't know how to use ftp, so he told me to install vnc so he could set it up for me. I didn't know VNC either but the second my mouse moved without my will my hand grabbed the modem cable.

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