History

blackcobalt.net was formed in June 2003, as a break-off network from the long standing network icerealm.net. This page is a brief summary of the history of the network, the founders of it and how it came to be in the first place. For people who actually know who I am, this brief summary was written by dave (aka nodnuke23), and tells it from my perspective.

Way back in 1996 or so, I used to frequent the ConferenceRoom IRC network - the name of which escapes me for the moment - in a channel called #ts. I don't know whether it's still around, but I presume not since it was set up to host the IRC room for various C&C Tiberian Sun websites - most of which are now deceased. This was my kind of starting ground in IRC and I learnt the meaning of chanop, ircop, etc. It was the first network I ventured onto, and hence the addictiveness of IRC began.

I met a guy called UnknownTS (or at least I think that's what his name was), and we used to use a crappy old IRCd for windows (not wIRCd, some other shareware IRC server) that sucked a lot, but it was fun because we got to manage our own server, do the things that ircops did, and things like that. It was just a pity because he didn't have a dedicated server that was on 24/7, so it was a bit useless really. A couple months later, I met cvdveer - who is still a network administrator - and set up a good old dreamforge (the old DALnet IRCd) server on his linux box, hence introducing me to the world of linux.

It was around about the same time (late 1997 to early 1998) that I discovered #wIRCd on DALnet (which I was pleased to discover is still around to a certain extent). There, I discovered a plethora of people to link to, and was linked to various (admittedly crap) networks, before I decided to form a network of my own. I met Chaotic, and we formed a new network, which for the time had the absolutely brilliant address node06c3.a2000.nl. We soon got hold of a domain, and hence we created irc.cnc.nl.eu.org for all C&C enthusiasts. Naturally, it was about as popular as Noel Edmonds (UK people will get this joke) and we changed to bleuh.net. At this time, I met avenj who is now one of our network adminstrators.

We managed to get hold of a domain, and this was the ever-popular bleuh.net (yes, I'm being sarcastic). We changed name yet again (and for the final time) to icerealm.net - a name suggested by me for once. I'd also been quite an avid player of the online space strategy game Planetarion, and frequented their network quite a lot. I met a guy called Spinlock, who'd made another online game similar to Planetarion, and eventually that game became a part of icerealm.net (about 2001). It was at this time that Aerv became part of our staff, and he's still here acting as a network administrator.

Everything went swimmingly until, unfortunately, we invited another online game to join the network (early 2002). This destabilised everything, and hence Spinlock left, and we fell out in a big way. The other game left also, but Randal, one of the game's administrators at the time, left their staff to join ours. This had all happened by mid 2002, and we were a bit gutted, since the network's lusers count had gone from a respectable 150 to about 40 in the space of a couple of months.

As typically happens, me, Randal and Aerv fell out with Chaotic pretty spectacularly, which led to the demise of icerealm.net and the creation of blackcobalt.net since we didn't have any control over the DNS at the time. Most of the major channels moved with us at that time.

We're still a pretty small network, averaging around about 50-60 users at any one time, but we're growing, and we will (hopefully) soon have quite a few more. I hope this has interested some people, as it's the first time I've really written this all down. If anything here is incorrect, then please say, and I'll try to correct if I can.