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I am an Old. Pre-ads, before the <img> tag made someone out there think banners (and then animated banners, and then Flash, and then flash ads at the side of dancing silhouettes that sent your CPU fans whirring), this was still Someone Else's Hardware. Typically a university.

Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good example. We never really paid for what we got on the internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam off of universities to ad-supported.