This summer, it will be 20 years ago, BlaatSchaap was founded. A spin-off of the #SkyOS and #pctrouble chatrooms, on IRC of course.
Back in those days, I was learning to code, and as a project to do so, I decided to write a bot to sit in our newly created chatroom.
The programming language was Delphi, as I already knew some Pascal, Delphi was the logical next step when going from DOS to Windows.

Using a pirated version of Delphi 7 Professional, as Delphi 7 Personal Edition didn’t include the TCPClient component. Did I know much?
With the knowledge I have today, I could probably have made my own bindings to winsock, but back then, it were my first steps into writing
something beyond the hello world level.

Now, almost 20 years later, I think, to celebrate the fact BlaatSchaap was founded 20 years ago this summer, I’ll write a new IRC bot.
Of course, in the good old BlaatSchaap tradition, I’ll implement the IRC client to server protocol. It ain’t about getting the bot to
respond to certain commands, it’s the road there. It’s about implementing the protocol, parsing the messages, stuff like that. Been reading up on the IRC protocol(s), RFC 1459, RFC 2812, IRCv3, and Modern IRC. (oh… and while reading up, I also came across IRCX, Microsoft’s 1998 proposed extensions to the protocol)