IRCnet, the biggest
IRC network in
Europe, also occasionally mistakenly called
EUnet. It features servers in all continents and averages daily 80,000-100,000 simultaneous users (out of which roughly half are bound to be
bots).
IRCnet, in actuality, is what is left of the remnants of the original inter-continental EFnet, which split into these two separate parts in the early autumn of 1996 as a result of a certain amount of administrative disagreement and politically incorrect behaviour among the major hub administrators. It would be wrong to name any persons possibly involved, especially not Vesa or Barron. They were Innocent.
The official reason for this split was, of course, the broken timestamping
allegedly caused by some of the servers in the European part of the network (which prereffed ND/CD over TS as their primary abuse-prevention protocol).
In the administrative circles, the split of The Original IRC Network into these two giants was not quite as unexpected as it might have seemed to the innocent end-user. Certain amount of anger and hate had been in the air for months and months in the end, before the inevitable took place. It was, however, a complete surprise to many of the administrators that this all would take place Right Here, Right Now.
Only days after the split was the first romantic vision of a wholly rejoint network painted and circulating the two networks. Others were also fancying
a complete rework of the network! One with DALnet, Undernet and all the other younger siblings connected and linked up to the network.
The vision, unfortunately, had little to do with the administrative realities of these two networks, which remained separate for the months that came and the months to come.