What's wild to me is how IRC was the wormhole that essentially got me out of my small hometown, and established everything I've been able to do over the last thirty years. It's scary to think about how much impact something like a chat server could have.

My gateway drug was ANSi art, and that whole scene. I made connections when I was 13 to folks who ran the groups, folks 6-10 years old that me, and was offered my first internship in the Bay Area through IRC. I drove across America in a beat up Honda Civic where the muffler fell off halfway there. But that was it: Through a bit of weird gumption and blocks of colored ascii, I was working at a design agency in Silicon Valley. Everything kinda barreled forward from there.

I think about this quite a bit: Unevenly distributed opportunity. There are a lot of smart, creative, emotionally intelligent folks stuck for lack of opportunity, and it seems like if you value GDP growth or general societal forward momentum on a whole, then maximizing access to those opportunity footholds should be a first-order priority of society.

Anyway, thanks IRC, and the folks who maintained / maintain it.