| DALnet was founded in July 1994 by the users of #startrek on the EFnet IRC network. They were frustrated with the amount of netsplits on EFnet and wanted an alternate IRC network to get away from the chaos.
As DALnet's own history document will attest, DALnet's popularity is largely due to the mIRC IRC client. mIRC is currently, the most widely used IRC client in the world. The link between DALnet and mIRC is due to mIRC's servers.ini list, which basically had DALnet listed as the default network.
Another significant item to note about DALnet was it's change in nickname length -- allowing much longer nicknames than the 9 that Undernet and EFnet allowed. Please note that the nickname length is not a technical advancement -- it's easily changed, but is more of a political change. Coincidently, DALnet's server code was originally based off of Undernet's IRCD.
DALnet's inovations included WALLOPS (messages IRC operators can send to all users who are set to +w mode), Qlines (server configuration that prevents certian nicknames from being used), global klines and GlobOps (IRC operator only communications). Most of these features were added in early 1995, along with DALnet's nick/channel services.
In late January of 1995, ChanServ was launched. #StarTrek and #DS9 were the first two channels registered.
NickServ was launched in March of 1995. "Morph" was the first nickname registered.
To read more about DALnet and it's history, see their history page | 
