To my dismay, I learned today that bash.org went down some time ago (2023). For those who don’t know what bash.org is, or was I guess, it’s a collection of chat snippets from IRC channels. Sort of a “best of” of the earlier days of IRC. Fortunately, a few archivists preserved the collection, and this is one of those archives. The best are pretty good, the worst are… pretty bad. Lots of racism. There are a lot of entries, some of which are still quoted around the internet today, and they represent a crowd-curated snapshot of what the internet was like around the turn of the century.
A selection of notable pieces in the collection (that is, I just went through and picked some I remember from the days of yore):
hunter2
types of people
lost machine
helping a newbie
inverted b
experiencing nature
neighborhood bonfire
advanced robotics
business acumen
essence of IRC
top minds of IRC
Thanks for the laughs.
I haven’t been around for IRC, but I’ve definitely seen some of your picks quoted before.
It’s a cultural touchstone for sure. Back in the day it was a significant part of internet culture. It’s still around, it’s just not as mainstream as more modern iterations of social media.