#gifted
(Some thoughts on #gifted and its origins, written on its third birthday)
By Dylan Flipse (With Neil Bardhan)

Before #gifted-
I convinced my dad to let me sign up with Uplink in March of 1996. The day I signed up with my ISP, I called Neil Bardhan (my friend from what was then four years of camp), and excitedly got his email address. He and I were soon emailing regularly. Over the next six months (which included our last year of camp, the Australia trip, and our first two Reunions), I had a fairly large list of email contacts, most of them Gifted Camp people. Around the end of summer and early fall, I sent my now-infamous Fun Facts Of The Day. Also, I began to teach myself HTML and construct my Old Page. Finally, Neil and I had wanted to talk to each other in something closer to realtime almost right from the beginning. He snail-mailed me a floppy disk with mIRC but, of course, I couldn't get it to work. So we tried several webchats. Neil and I (along with Liz Learn) used one at Firefly.com several times, but that service sadly no longer exists.

Very early #gifted-
On October 20, I hit an odd spot of luck. I happened to put the disk from Neil into my computer, ran mIRC (I believe it was somewhre between v3.90 and v4.1), and...it connected to Chicago.IL.US.Undernet.Org. Not fully understanding the power of multitasking at the time, I quickly closed the program and sent Neil an excited email in which I said I was pretty sure I'd gotten on IRC. I came back later that night, and I saw @NP3BS in the userlist. I wish I had logs from back then, because I've got a feeling that the first words in #gifted were something along the lines of "Neil, is that you?" We chatted for a bit and then I believe that one of us was disconnected. For the next few months, we would send each other emails with the Subject "SOP" (for Standard Operating Procedure), indicating that we should meet in #gifted on IRC.

Early troubles-
We had a lot of trouble at first. One big problem was that I couldn't figure out how to Op Neil. So if I arrived first, he would always say "Ok, leave for about 30 seconds, and then come back in." In those days, we didn't really expect any visitors, so we usually set the channel to +p. (Meaning Private. It actually means no one can get info about the channel if they aren't in it, but we thought it meant no one else could come in.) Connecting back then was a fairly tricky thing. We started on that Chicago server and Chicago-1, but we experienced more than our share of lag there. (Partially because the whole Undernet was generally laggy back then. But not that I knew there was lag anyway, I didn't "get" pinging people because my version of mIRC didn't show ping times, for some reason.) After that, we used RockHill.SC.US.Undernet.Org, but when that too was unstable we settled in on Baltimore.MD.US.Undernet.Org, which we still primarily use today.

More people-
It was much to our surprise when someone named AmyW showed up one day while we were chatting along. It was actually an amazing thing. AmyW was (still is, I guess), a key member of Windmill Frasier Multimedia, a software company. She was the first person we ever really talked to in the channel other than each other. She came back once more, probably about a year later. The memories after that are fairly fuzzy. Some of the first people (this is closer to the end of 1996) were Wendy Girven (She saw #gifted and thought of gifted camp), Liz Learn (Neil and I installed mIRC for her), Jack Foust and Sean C. (really the first "random" people to stick around), Matt Dudek (I got him online from his house), Jessica Gulash (getting into the first months of 1997 now), Brandy LeRoy (I remember the day Neil emailed me, saying "Wow, this amazingly cool girl came into the channel...") and other people who were here quite early that I'm sure to have forgotten.

CService-
By February of 1997, IRC in #gifted was pretty much an everyday thing. I no longer sent out SOP messages when I got home from school, because it was understood that we'd meet in #gifted. A girl I go to school with, Bekki Sander, used to also hang out on the Undernet, but in a channel called #pibblair. She told me about registering a channel one day in Algebra class. She told me I might need a channel log. So, my very first #gifted log started on Feb. 4th, 1997, the same day I turned in the CService application. (I used the nicks and email addresses of about four people from #pibblair on that application.) The very first thing in that very first log was Matt Dudek saying "P." (He was in the process of spelling out Peanut, one letter per line.) On Valentine's Day, W showed up. Within a few days, I'd pretty much figured the bot out and the channel becomes what I considered "established."

The rest-
It's fairly hard to write about the 2.5 years or so since then. This is not because I have the attitude many who've been online "forever" have, namely the-"Man, this channel was better when the whole Undernet was terribly lagged and it was only Neil and I and we only came on once a week" attitude. Instead, there have been so many more people that I can't come close to naming everyone. One trend, however, is that the new people stopped being friends that, say, Neil and I downloaded mIRC for, and has moved more towards friends of friends and their friends, and so I've met untold numbers of people through the channel. But also, in the past 2.5 years, we haven't had big "firsts" like we did for that first half year. (Not that we haven't had them. The current log starts Nov 30, 1998, we first hit 20 people sometime not long before that, Neil took a bit of a sabbatical in mid-1999, etc) Instead, the changes have been, actually, more significant changes in the nature of the channel. On one hand, #gifted doesn't quite hold the same sense of adventure for me as when Neil and I were figuring things out as we went, everything was new, every little thing was cool, and anytime someone else joined the channel, it was an "event." It's different now, but it's more of an amazing thing. The channel is something of a lifestyle for some few of us and it's a part of all of our lives. (To varying degrees, obviously.) A quick count in the channel just now showed 21 people, which is not too out of the ordinary for primetime on a weeknight. Twenty of those are people I'd consider regulars in the channel. Considering that we used to send email to call each other into the channel, Neil and I of three years ago would've never believed you if you showed us a current #gifted log and told us that's where the channel would be in three years. But I think we'd be happy with it.