[avemg]

Can't speak for OP, but my progression went like this starting in 1995:

- Start wasting lots of time in MSN chatrooms

- Parents cancel MSN and switch to local ISP. Mourn loss of chatrooms.

- Discover IRC using the mIRC client

- Start playing around with mIRC scripting

- Get into Linux because that's what the crowd I hung out with on IRC was using

- Switch to epic and BitchX and start scripting on this clients

- Get into eggdrops and start scripting those and then start looking through the actual source code and making changes

- Start writing my own bots

Amazing how much my current career as a software dev is owed to things I learned because I liked "wasting" time chatting online.

[runeb]

Nostalgic read! Same here, '96. Then getting into irc wars, net splits and nickname collisions, taking over channels. Finding bugs in eggdrop 1.1.5 to gain op on channels. Never did work with TCL again though.