Basically, the old IRC protocol was pretty brittle. You could break the network with DDOS attacks, exploits, etc. in order to get "ops" on IRC channels. This resulted in a sort of emergent hacker game called channel wars. Massive attacks were constantly being launched, to the point that running an IRC server became a way to have a serious target painted on your connection.

I think he's remembering #e or something like that, where I spent a great part of my childhood (before it moved to Freenode and forked to #gah) where things happened before the public knew, such as VA Linux, E17, offended.co.uk (author of feh), and MythTV.

And ferite. (a c-like scripting language that I love, with regex's)