It all really started sometime in November 1996, I visited a friend across the street and he showed me his new hobby, IRC! I tried it a bit and chatted with some of his friends in a channel called #Friend's_place on undernet, that channel is since long ago dead and I no longer have any contact with any of the people in that channel, but it was my first experience of IRC and the chat program mIRC.

The same night I went home and decided that I would buy a modem myself, the very next day I went to the local computer store and bought my first (and only) modem, a US robotics 28.8bps, it still works, but I use my 8/1Mbps ADSL now.

I soon found that I enjoyed scripting a lot, started to hang in #mIRC on undernet where I met pai (author peace&protection, probably the best script ever)*. At the same time I launched my very first scripting site; its URL was http://mircshop.base.org.

At this time it was really only 4 major script sites, CT Fire (probably the best), hawkee.com, mirc-scripts.org and mircscripts.com. Soon pai launched pairc.com and I helped there and pointed my URL to it instead.

Anyways.. there is an interesting story on how I managed to get my hands on the mirc.net domain. The domain was in the past owned by someone in Asia, I believe it was Thailand. It was not used for anything at all. I knew pai wanted the domain and I knew another op in #mirc (Free) wanted the domain name too. What I didn't know was that the #mIRC op was negotiating with the owner to buy the domain from him. The domain was about to expire so I checked it pretty much every day. One day I saw it was not registered anymore! I quickly registered it using Network Solutions and it was finally mine!

Now you might wonder how the previous owner who was negotiating to sell it for $1000 would let the domain expire! Well, if I recall right he had registered domain in the name of the company he worked for using his daughter's university email. His daughter had quit the university so he no longer had access to the email account needed to change owner details of the domain and he had a fight with the owner of the company he worked at and had gotten fired. Network Solutions demanded a fax sent from the company with the company letterhead and such to modify the domain, since this was no longer possible, he and the intended buyer made a deal. He would stop paying for the domain and let it expire, then reregister it and transfer it to the new owner.

But things didn't go as intended and I managed to register mirc.net in between, I did of course not know anything about these secret negotiations and was forwarded an email with the correspondence between buyer and seller after I bought the domain. Unfortunately the buyer never received his money back :-(

Anyway, it was now 7th March 1999 and I was sitting at home happy with my new domain. I started working on the new design and it turned out like this: I had no knowledge of Perl or CGI and all pages were static and manually updated for every script submitted to me by email. At this time I was running the site all by myself and it was a real pain to update the script download link list since it was all done manually. I also had to verify the download links once a week to make sure they were all working. I soon received help from Ntd to write articles and maintain the site and soon after Drg (DragonCurv) joined and helped. Drg rewrote most of the site into CGI and later into PHP3. We had a nice forum and the site was running great until the web hosting provider came to me and told me that our forum script was using 80% of his server's CPU and we used way more then our allowed bandwidth. Drg and I rewrote the forum into PHP instead of Perl and the CPU load decreased some.

After a year at the host I decided to start my own shell provider. I bought a server hosted at nebrix.net and moved the site. Now we could host all scripts ourselves instead of linking to them on other pages, the site grew and grew. Ntd had to leave to spend more time with his music and studies, and Drg soon left too. During this period of time I lost a bit interest in the site, learning how to use Linux and such was more fun and then an HD crash happened which resulted in me losing all my data. I only had backup of the webpage, not the huge script archive. So, mirc.net transformed into a help site with just articles and a forum.

In the Summer of 2002 I met MUTU, and we merged his irc-resource.com and my mirc.net. We used the PHP-nuke portal and converted the old help files into the new theme. MUTU started the mirc.net news section and we moved into an IRC news site with mIRC tutorials and help files.

In the Spring/Summer of 2003 MUTU and I started to talk about rewriting the site again and started to talk about how we wanted the site. At that time Ethaniel who had irctools.com contacted us and asked if we should merge. I admit I was not very keen on this at first but I figured as long we could all decide the future of the site, it was ok. Ethaniel kept the old design of irctools.com and started to code and late in June 2003 mirc.net was relaunched in its current form with news, tutorials, scripts and so forth. Mentality, Wiggle and Tye joined later and Tye and Wiggle now do all the development of the site.

During 2004 mirc.net improved a lot. We added the mIRC servers.ini generator that was so popular at the first mirc.net site, a user world map where the users can place a dot at their location and color themes to let you decide the look of the site. We improved the mirc.net forum and we just recently added user pictures and user browser and network/channel browser where you can see the faces (or avatars) of the mirc.net community.

Last year (2004-2005) we grew from 2,600 unique visitors a day (March 2004) to 4,500 a day (January 2005) and we are still working hard to improve our site.

I would like to say thanks to everyone who followed the development of mirc.net and all of you who found our site and keep visiting us every week.

Let's all work together and make mirc.net even bigger and better during 2005!

magic, Feb 10 2005.