[mistrial9]

your timeline is a bit off there, but yes

[reflectiv]

His timeline sounds exactly right to me, I basically did the same thing.

Mid-late 90s I used Beej's network programming guide to write an IRC client.

[morelisp]

However, by late 90s you weren't paying for a C compiler, you had Cygwin, MinGW, or DJGPP (OK, probably no sockets in that case).

[mistrial9]

Screenshot of GCC 10.2 compiling its own source code Original author(s) Richard Stallman Developer(s) GNU Project Initial release March 22, 1987; 36 years ago