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IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

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Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#51

File #10 has an Israeli IRC user checking in moments after a SCUD missile hits: Is there anybody there? I am fine. Just got the damn gas mask off. Sorry A minute later he/she reports that Tel Aviv was hit, source being "my ears". IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...

I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#52
post #47

IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade. I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide…

I wonder if there will be a service that hits the sweet spot of cool community instant messaging over a large group of people in the next generation of technology, I think so.

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#53
post #47

IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade. I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide…

I wonder if there will be a service that hits the sweet spot of cool community instant messaging over a large group of people in the next generation of technology, I think so.

Well Twitter is where everyone goes now when something is broken. I'm not sure its the right solution but it's part of the way there.

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#54
post #47

IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade. I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide…

So many reports of other airplanes going missing on IRC that morning/day. Where were you on 9/11? “On IRC.”

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#55
post #40
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC protocol spec limits message length to 512 bytes, I know only of a single implementation that lets you go above that and many clients crash or otherwise break if you go above it.

Most clients will break it up into multiple messages no?

IIRC at least znc crashes, other clients like xchat start having rendering issues and some (I think irssi) completely disregard content after the 512th byte

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#56
post #51

File #10 has an Israeli IRC user checking in moments after a SCUD missile hits: Is there anybody there? I am fine. Just got the damn gas mask off. Sorry A minute later he/she reports that Tel Aviv was hit, source being "my ears". IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...

I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.

I've been on Freenode for almost 10 years now (9 years, 48 weeks, 4 days, 18:19:12 ago), it's the only network which doesn't seem to be shrinking, though most of my old friends are gone now.

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#57
post #51

File #10 has an Israeli IRC user checking in moments after a SCUD missile hits: Is there anybody there? I am fine. Just got the damn gas mask off. Sorry A minute later he/she reports that Tel Aviv was hit, source being "my ears". IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...

I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.

[deleted]

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#58

This is surprisingly interesting. I just picked a random log and found this: test to see if infoserver is echoing messages to group +war. well all this info is probably old. The iraqis caused an oil spill 8-10 miles long and a couple miles wide. It's 12 times the size of that caused by the exxon valdeez. It's not known if wells are actively pumping into the gulf right now, or if they just dumped stored reserves. If t…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill An air strike was conducted against the pipeline that was the most significant contributor of the spill, however there were some other sources as well. It ended up being several times larger than the Valdez spill, a lot of it ended up on the beaches of Saudi Arabia, and it was never cleaned up, so it's still causing a lot of ecological damage. I don't think I'd heard ab…

Really? You never saw photos of all the oil-covered birds? I thought it was pretty well-known.

Also, it wasn't an air strike against the pipeline, it was the Iraqis dumping oil to prevent US marine landings (from what I heard, they were planning on setting it on fire if there were any ships there? Game-of-Thrones-style).

The air strike was to prevent further spillage:

> On January 26, three US F-117 fighter-bombers destroyed pipelines to prevent further spillage into the Persian Gulf.

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#59
post #8

I'd like to see IRC logs from other countries at the same time. As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil... Hmm. I wonder what the IRC logs of the Venezuelan "liberation" will look like? Actually for Venezuelan's sake hopefully the economic warfare already going…

Large areas of WW2 were oil-related: North Africa, Indonesia, southern USSR (leading to Stalingrad), etc. I've not yet seen someone write the oil-orientated history of that war.

Re: IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

#60
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be good to have a map and timeline like that going back to the 10th century. Because I think that people _really_ could use some perspective.

Kind of an unified, explorable map of historical events, in which you can see how the borders looked like, could see various information overlays like trade routes, major wars, events, etc.? It's quite an endeavour but I believe a worthy one, and I hope a project like that will start soon. This could have tremendous effect on people. It's BretVictoresque stuff, things that could expand the space of thoughts we have,…

You might want to have a look a Centennia:

"CENTENNIA is a map-based guide to the history of Europe and the Middle East from the beginning of the 11th century to the present. It is a dynamic, animated historical atlas including over 9,000 border changes. The map controls evolve the map forward or backward in time bringing the static map to life. Our maps display every major war and territorial conflict displaying the status of each region at intervals of a tenth of a year."

http://www.clockwk.com

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