| | | EFnet currently has 44,508 users in 22,167 channels. | |
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In the beginning of IRC, networks were nebulous. They formed and dissolved as the people who programed and administered the servers formed alliances, had disagreements, and set the IRC stage for a decade of drama and intrigue. The dust had hardly settled when there emerged one main IRC network, A-Net, or Anarchy Net. But there were disagreements within Anarchy Net too. One group wanted to use a central server, Eris, from the University of California at Berkeley, to act as a hub to connect all U.S. servers to A-Net. Eris was linked to A-Net, and let any server that wanted link to it - passwords and permissions were not needed. Upset over the chaos brought to the network, other server operators wanted more structured rules about who could link, and wanted to use a non-centralized backbone of servers to form the network. The argument was settled when existing servers Q-lined, or "quarantined" Eris, effectively cutting it off from the rest of A-Net.
The network was split into two parts - those who supported the anarchy net philosophy of open access through a central server, and the "Eris-Free Network" or EFNet. Anarchy net died soon after, while EFnet went on to become the largest of all IRC networks, and the parent network of Undernet, DALnet, and a host of other IRC networks.
Interesting links about the history of EFnet:
http://www.the-project.org/history.html
http://www.irc.org/history_docs/TheGreatSplit.html
http://daniel.haxx.se/irchistory.html
http://www.chatserver.org/history.asp
http://www.mirc.co.uk/help/jarkko2.txt
https://voting.blackened.com/index.shtml
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| | | EFnet currently has 44,508 users in 22,167 channels. | |
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