Slashdot Mirror

I am posting this mostly because it is so bizarre that even I have trouble believing it. I still take my medical notes (on a laptop with 2 128 GB SSDs in RAID0) in a 280k, $10 shareware DOS program called HyGen, developed by one of the early pioneers of hypertext, Neil Larson of MaxThink fame. It is a non-html hypertext program, where links in reference ASCII text DOS file names. Thus, with a simple DOS text editor (I use Qedit), you can take notes by typing, create new .TXT files, and link them manually. I do occasionally use UltraEdit to edit the files to paste in information from Windows. but the DOS text editor is so quick on a modern laptop that I preferentially use it for taking notes. This is perhaps the electronic equivalent of charcoal on papyrus, but I have to admit I've not found a more modern method that allows both creating and browsing hypertext fast enough to take notes in class. I did try Amaya and thought about converting it all to html but wasn't happy with the it compared to the DOS method. And yes, this old program won't run under Win7 command prompt, but it will run well in a DosBox. An older version of this is available on SimTel: http://www.simtel.net/free/Development-Hyper-Text-files-and-programs/hyplus-zip/46728.html A zip file with Hygen and Qedit (both shareware, if no longer readily available) and my current ASCII text hypertext-linked files is available at: http://www.conovers.org/ftp/Notebook.zip Remember, you may have to run it in DOSbox. Caveat: my medical notes are full of errors and you use at your own risk. And these are notes what I, as an experienced emergency physician, find useful, so you may not. If anyone actually decides to use this for medical notes, please let me know!

By the way, DMEXBar provides much of this functionality for Windows XP, for free (beer). It has been available well before the release of Windows Vista.

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

You're probably thinking of RIPScrip from Telegrafix. They devised a protocol called RIP that transmitted vector graphics as plain ASCII. Sort of a 90's precursor to SVG. They even developed browser plugins to use their vecor format on the web, and had some interesting demos before even Flash was out. Way ahead of its time, but it never caught on because the company kept everything proprietary, and wanted you to use only their software, or license the protocol from them. I think they finally folded about 4 or 5 years ago.

Some of the old BBS software, like MajorBBS and Wildcat! incorporated support for RIP by default in their later versions, and if you run DOSBox with modem emulation enabled, you can install RIPTerm 1.54 and connect to some BBSes by telnet to see RIP in action.

clambrac (722059): You need a degree to become a paid, hired code monkey for a company.

I don't have a degree.

I was ultimately hired as a computer programmer years ago due to what computer related information I knew at the time and this old MS-DOS program.

Today, I still don't have a degree now yet I wrote the two freeware/shareware programs on this page that solve a major problem that has been plaguing the Internet since May 1, 1978 or March 5, 1994 depending on who is doing the counting.

Now then, what is really more important when hiring your next computer programmer?

A degree and no real-world experience.

or

No degree and lots of real-world experience.

Bryan Taylor
iamcf13@hotpop.com
SpamByte code: 7
(see http://www.cf13.com/game-over-spammers.htm )
All email containing unwanted content will be summarily deleted or reported as spam.

The information in this post is the end result of many months of thought and software development. If you find the information below has merit, please, by all means take advantage of it and use it. This will be the only post of the actual information by me. All future posts of this material will consist of the URL pointer to this post. Should this post be accidentally or intentionally deleted, I will repost it in its entirety again and link to it as needed as explained above.

The information in this post, if widely used, will effectively make spam and malware infestation of computer systems running Microsoft Windows impossible.

Thank you for your consideration,

Bryan Taylor
iamcf13@hotpop.com
SpamByte code: 7 (see below)

------- Begin information Below -------
From http://www.cf13.com/

CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) Slashdot-Friendly Page

What are they?
A Shareware RFC821/RFC1939 compatible SMTP/POP3 server program for Microsoft(R) Windows.
It was written in Microsoft(R) Visual C++. The UPX-compressed executable file
containing the complete program is 130,048 bytes in size. A Freeware RFC1939 POP3 client
program created in the above manner is 75,264 bytes in size.

Who wrote them? Bryan Taylor, author of the MS-DOS/TURBO PASCAL program FILE-IT.

Why were they written? To solve the twin problems of email spam and email malware.

How does CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) work?
1) It is an all-in-one SMTP/POP3 email transport solution.
2) It is simple to use and fast.
3) It is extremely reliable when operating under nominal conditions.
4) It is hostile to spammers and computer crackers.

How does CF13-POP3(TM) work?
1) It is hostile to spammers and computer crackers.
2) It is simple to use and fast.
3) It is extremely reliable when operating under nominal conditions.

When are they available? They are available now. See next question for availability.

Where are they available?
CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) is available here. CF13-POP3(TM) is available here.

Original site is here. Mirror site is here.

The ideas inside these two software computer programs are hereby declared patent
free. These two software computer programs are publication of said ideas and thus
said ideas become 'prior art' and are unpatentable either in whole or in part.

Copyright 2004 Bryan Taylor -- All Rights Reserved -- http://www.cf13.com/
Last Update: Tuesday, July 06, 2004, 11:19 Universal Coordinated Time

-- SpamByte information below is used by both programs above to identify and filter out spam and malware --
Startup banner from:
http://www.cf13.com/cf13pop3.exe

CF13-POP3(TM)
Copyright 2004 Bryan Taylor -- All Rights Reserved
http://www.cf13.com/
Last Update: Tuesday, July 06, 2004, 11:19 Universal Coordinated Time

LICENSE: FREEWARE! SHARE & ENJOY!
PLEASE VIRUS CHECK THIS PROGRAM BEFORE MAKING COPIES FOR OTHERS.

DISCLAIMER: USE THIS PROGRAM SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK!
ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTIES WHATSOEVER!

Note: Your use of this program rewards the creators of the SMTP/POP3 protocols.
Your purchase and use of CF13-SMTP(TM) / CF13-POP3(TM) will reward the
author for making that program available for use at http://www.cf13.com/
and reduce Internet email abuse.

Software should help people, bring people together, make stuff easier to do.
-- Henrik S. Hansen

usage: cf13pop3 svr port login pw SpamByte wantspam

svr - server

Here's a great freeware UNIVAC simulator you can use until you get your own UNIVAC off eBay. MTBF on those babies was somewhere around 10 hours due to the use of vacuum tubes...hopefully your PC running this sim will post somewhat better reliability numbers. :D If you'd like to see some dino-iron in person, a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. This page is full of good information and links. Also, check out this list if you're interested in restorations of other ancient machines such as Crays and Cybers; my favorites are the Royal-McBee LGP 21 and 30 machines, immortalized in the Jargon File mythologies about Real Programmers. Read The Story of Mel and be enlightened (as well as entertained) about how a True Master thinks when dealing with the limitations of old hardware. It's so Zen it will make you clap with one hand.

It used to be that if you wanted the latest greatest freeware and shareware for Windows and DOS, you'd hit the public FTP archives of places like my personal favorite, wuarchive.wustl.edu or you'd telnet or dialup your favorite BBS.

Or even better, you'd take three floppies and knock on the door of some hip techie to get the latest Apogee computer game (remember, Commander Keen?).

And when you couldn't do that, you'd flirt with some geek in the lab so that he'd teach you how to use rz or kermit to download freeware on your own. Ah, those were the days. I think I'll go fire up Telix.

Today, if you can't Google it, you can always try Simtel, a great place to find classic freeware as well.

What about using the old, 16-bit Windows software, even under Windows XP? You can go to places like Simtel and browse their old archives... I used to search there all the time, years ago, and they may still have freeware titles from the era stashed in their archive.

"to some magic 1.22 meg format that mysteriously made my floppies faster"

No magic at all. I used the shit out of that program. It was called fdformat and even came with Pascal source code! scheweet There were two little parameters called Xnnn and Ynnn that did sector sliding.

From the fdformat docs... These options can be used to enhance the performance of your disk up to 100%. This is a bit difficult to explain. Imagine a standard 360 kB disk. It has 9 sectors on each track numbered 1 to 9. Normally the sectors on all tracks ordered "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9". With sector sliding of 1 you order "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9" on track 0, "9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8" on track 1, "8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7" of track 2 and so on. You can easily imagine, that it takes a little time, when your diskette drive head steps from one track to another. But your diskette continues rotating. Without sector sliding your diskette is positioned to sector 2 or 3 on the next track, when the stepping is done. It needs nearly a full revolution until sector 1 of the next track can be read. With sector sliding of 1 or 2 your diskette is positioned exactly on sector 1, when it starts reading again.

This little bit of magic was somewhat drive-specific, since some drives were faster than others, you needed to use different sliding numbers, but all in all, it's a very cool hack.

Windows only, but there is this one

BTW, is the old 1981 IBM BIOS code in public domain yet?

The MASM source to a "generic" early PC BIOS has been on simtel.net for many years: http://www.simtel.net/pub/pd/50185.html

http://www.simtel.net/product.download.mirrors.php ?id=50185

BTW, is the old 1981 IBM BIOS code in public domain yet?

The MASM source to a "generic" early PC BIOS has been on simtel.net for many years: http://www.simtel.net/pub/pd/50185.html

http://www.simtel.net/product.download.mirrors.php ?id=50185

The reviewer lost all my respect at that sentence. If the review didn't already sound like an advert, calling PKZIP 'special' and providing a link to the PKWare store just flipped my mind a bit. You should be able to find PKZIP at Simtel.

Ah, well, I'm keeping my copies of PKZIP (v1.1 & v2.04e) safe on many archive CDs.

...have fun...

http://www.simtel.net/product.php?url_fb_product_p age=49632

They can keep up because the tools to do what was expensive a few years ago are affordable today. I'll cite an example of my own creation: Using the free integrated development tool, "Game Maker," I made a game in 72 hours for a competition. You can see the game here on Simtel. It's a fairly simple kind of game that you might've seen in the mid to late 80s selling for $30-40, and likely with graphics of lesser quality, too(the tiles probably would have been better and more diverse with more time to play with them, but they didn't have the same resolution or color depth then). It would have taken probably at least a month to make, depending on the platform. But I did a 2003 equivalent in three days, with 10 levels, sound and music and recordable high scores, because I had the tools to do it.

A small team today can get into game development through the shareware market, which has always had its share of diamonds among a rubble of uninspired clones and "1,000,000 variations on Solitare." Consider 3drealms and Epic, both of whom brought themselves up through shareware sales. There are developers today pulling out success at the "low" end, too, like Popcap, Dexterity, and GarageGames. But you'll notice that they never go in the console market, because consoles realistically are a playground for the industry giants, with a market that faces significant challenge in expanding demographic reach(it's a chicken-egg situation - no games to appeal to a new segment, no segment to buy those games) and no method of distribution outside of retail.

A lot of attention is put on the console market, where it seems like a lot of action takes place. And it seems like big budgets lock small developers out. But in reality, larger budgets mean less innovation. All the best games of today are evolutions or reworkings of previous games. GTA3 comes from GTA, which itself was taking a new angle on the maze games of yesteryear(Pac-Man etc.) The Sims is a new angle on Simcity. Diablo 2 is a new angle on Rogue. All the Lucasarts games have their heritage in ADVENT. These are not triumphs of technology, but good design and well-rounded development. It stands to reason that in reality, there is nothing stopping a small developer. Their only limit is that they can't push the envelope in ways that will break their bank. If they want to go for the high end, they can start small and build up with sequels that evolve the technology each time. The market will prove whether or not they are worthy. And the little guys will never get hopelessly far behind, either.

Win 98/XP
DiskAccess Windows NFS Client

Linux should be obvious.

ObOnTopic: It's very easy to scan in a book with the right equipment (namely, a decent saw - bandsaws work well - and an auto-duplex document feeder), and OCR software is very accurate these days. Even the unproofed versions of HP5 are quite good. I should know; I downloaded a copy because my Amazon order was late. :(

ObOnTopic: It's very easy to scan in a book with the right equipment (namely, a decent saw - bandsaws work well - and an auto-duplex document feeder), and OCR software is very accurate these days. Even the unproofed versions of HP5 are quite good. I should know; I downloaded a copy because my Amazon order was late. :(

This is the freely available version of Athene and DML. The Pandora Engine is also included in this archive.

http://www.simtel.net/pub/dl/60070.shtml

http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:http://www.ro cklyte.com/downloads.html

A little digging through google caches got me to a mirror site for the Athene on Win32/Linux executable:

http://www.simtel.net/pub/pd/60070.html

No, it isn't the bootable linux iso environment, so no bonus points for me, but it will give you an idea of how the athene GUI works.

You could check if the problem is Rendezvous by sending your father DockBrowser (perhaps by compiling it up for him first.) This should only show the machines available via Rendezvous.

You could check if it was Appletalk by loading up chooser in Classic mode, perhaps with the Who's There rdev. It should only show machines available via Appletalk

You could disable appletalk in the ethernet interface connnected to the cable modem (Its in the Network pane in the System Preferences app.) and leave it on in the Airport interface.

• Drivers: Via, nVidia, and Intel chipsets; ATI Rage 128, ATI Radeon, and nVidia GPUs; Highpoint HPT37x and Promise Ultra IDE controllers; miscellaneous 3Com, AMD, Intel, Linksys, and NetGear NICs; Sound Blaster PCI, Sound Blaster Live, Santa Cruz, and Via integrated sound cards; DirectX; Palm Desktop; Nero UDF reader
• Applications: Mozilla, CDex, OpenOffice.org, Pixia*, SmartFTP
• Plugins and viewers: Adobe Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, Ghostscript and GSView, IrfanView, Java Runtime Environment, QuickTime, Winamp
• Emergency rescue stuff: Norton Disk Editor, Diskman, DOSLFN, MBRWork, Norton Disk Doctor, RegEdit, CTMOUSE, FIPS, Ghost, NTFSDOS, Partition Manager, Partition Resizer, RawWrite plus a DOS boot disk image, Info-Zip UNZIP, Restoration
• Miscellanous utilities: Ad-Aware, UnxUtils, wget, PGP, Privoxy, Restoration, TweakUI, TweakUI XP, VDMSound, XVI32

* I'd like to include The Gimp, but I often install the free/Free stuff from this CD onto computers I give to charity, where people might take offense to the name. I'll probably replace Pixia with CinePaint in the future.

Damn. I should've trademarked the name.

In response to my own post, I actually found the tiny DOS terminal program I used on the floppy... It is called Lync 2.0, a 43k executable that has menu support, X/Y/Z-modem transfer, etc. etc.. Ironically, the documentation for the program is larger than the program itself! Using an executable compressor, it should be possible to get the size down even smaller (it doesn't appear that this was done to it already)...

In response to my own post, I actually found the tiny DOS terminal program I used on the floppy... It is called Lync 2.0, a 43k executable that has menu support, X/Y/Z-modem transfer, etc. etc.. Ironically, the documentation for the program is larger than the program itself! Using an executable compressor, it should be possible to get the size down even smaller (it doesn't appear that this was done to it already)...

You didn't even mention TheDraw. Goodness!

And for keeping tabs on what is on which disk... I've been using a freeware program called "Cathy" (I don't have any links)...Although I don't know whether it'll do DVD's, I haven't tried.

Cathy is avalible for download here. According to these sites it will handle many disk formats ("CD-ROMs, LS120, Iomega Zip and Jaz disks, or even diskettes"). The link to the home page is broken.

And for keeping tabs on what is on which disk... I've been using a freeware program called "Cathy" (I don't have any links)...Although I don't know whether it'll do DVD's, I haven't tried.

Cathy is avalible for download here. According to these sites it will handle many disk formats ("CD-ROMs, LS120, Iomega Zip and Jaz disks, or even diskettes"). The link to the home page is broken.

There was an MS-DOS shareware product -- in fact, it was the product for which the word "shareware" was coined, and by a guy who'd been Microsoft employee number 9, no less -- called PC-Write. It was a lightweight (fit on a floppy), blindingly fast (even on an original 4.77 MHz 8088) quasi-WYSIWYG word processor. I tried it, I paid for it, I used it a lot. With a little care, you could do fairly close to WYSIWYG editing of plain ASCII files.

The author (Bob Wallace) passed away September 29, 2002. His company is long gone, as is the company his product was sold to.

It looks as if you can download version 3.04 here. Halfway down this page you'll find version 4.15. The Pascal source code was available at one point; it's probably disappeared.

A similar product, "Breeze Word Processor," appears to be available here. This is a four year old (to the day!) Netnews discussion of lightweight MS-DOS word processor packages. Your very best bet might be an MS-DOS or Windows 3.x version of WordPerfect or Microsoft Word.

None of these are actively supported.-(

In this day when people lightly port Sim City and Civilization to PDAs and phones and web browsers, it shouldn't be that hard to recreate one of these.

P.S.: What OS is your 8 MB system running?

You are an annoying zealot. Die.

Look here it no longer removes AdAware.

According to simtel.net the latest version (rl3r52a.exe) does not un-install Ad-Aware. Think the damage has already been done to Radlight's reputation now, though :)

Speaking of Xmodem - remember Ymodem, Zmodem, and all those? What was the one that allowed you to do bidirectional transfers? I can't remember what it's called and I'm bugging out. I remember using it on OS/2 and it had a $15 license fee (shareware).

Ah! Google has this site:
http://www.simtel.net/pub/msdos/commprog/

Unfortunately I don't think it was HydraCom.

That was ages ago. I remember it rocking because it made it much easier to keep up with the upload/download ratio.

You can't run cygwin (that's for Windows) but you can run the GNUish utilities. GNUish was started a long time ago to port (or recreate) GNU utilities on DOS. It's great!

Some links:

• Robomail Evaluation
• Robomail 1/2
• Robomail 2/2

Jason

Some links:

• Robomail Evaluation
• Robomail 1/2
• Robomail 2/2

Jason

Here's some useful links on good-sized DOS RAMdisks. fu_rd19iXMSDSK W0rm [boot]Disks. Have fun kiddos.

Even better- I was browsing the Simtel archives, and was quite amused to find a language called B-flat. :)

In the computer world, in the 1960s the most widely available output device was a "line printer". This was a printer which printed up to 132 characters on each line of 11x17 paper. The printer could be told to stay on the same line, so text could be printer over other previously printed text. There were a large number of images developed to be printed out, including ones which were printed in several columns which had to be joined side-to-side (such as an image of a jet flying over the Golden Gate bridge). Both simple printing and overprinting were used. Here is an example circa 1973; it was such a popular technique that even self-portraits were done with it.

There were programs available for creating "printer art". You'd give the program a two-dimensional matrix of integers with the gray scale value desired for each pixel. The programs simply translated the gray scale numbers to the character (or characters) used for the nearest shade of gray. The programs were particularly convenient if you were one of the few people with some sort of image scanning device.

When ASCII became popular, with Teletypes and 72-80 character timesharing terminals becoming common, the same technology was used there. Some artists preferred to (or didn't know about the programs) manually create the art with text editors (or tools like a 1987 program for creating printer art). Some of the same images appeared on terminals.

Obviously, text characters were used simply for their gray-scale pixel value. The same technology can be used for images, by selecting component images based on brightness and color values.

There are now many ASCII Art sites on the Web. This Conversion Programs information is from this ASCII Art FAQ. An online example of a conversion program is GIF2TXT, which converts any online image -- try giving it that Slashdot logo at the upper left of this page. If you don't get enough ASCII Art links here, try the ASCII Art WebRing.

Digital River must be fanatically sticking to The Microsoft Code of Business Ethics. Here is the message I got when trying to access my local Simtel mirror

The Simtel.Net web pages are no longer supported on this server. On January 15, 2001, Digital River, Inc. (the owner of Simtel.Net) terminated its contract with Petersen Data Management, Inc. (Keith B. Petersen, et al), due to lack of funding. Mr. Petersen had previously provided archive management and associated support services for Simtel since 1983.

All questions or comments should be sent to webmaster@Simtel.Net

No more quick transfers for me.

Of course, Simtel.net is still up, but it's now a slick, flashy reincarnation that stinks of corporatism. No more of that simple layout we held close to our hearts.

Wonder where all this is leading to...

Digital River must be fanatically sticking to The Microsoft Code of Business Ethics. Here is the message I got when trying to access my local Simtel mirror

The Simtel.Net web pages are no longer supported on this server. On January 15, 2001, Digital River, Inc. (the owner of Simtel.Net) terminated its contract with Petersen Data Management, Inc. (Keith B. Petersen, et al), due to lack of funding. Mr. Petersen had previously provided archive management and associated support services for Simtel since 1983.

All questions or comments should be sent to webmaster@Simtel.Net

No more quick transfers for me.

Of course, Simtel.net is still up, but it's now a slick, flashy reincarnation that stinks of corporatism. No more of that simple layout we held close to our hearts.

Wonder where all this is leading to...

Do you have any thoughts about why the shell concept has not caught on with other operating systems?

Probably because Mac OS and Windows are designed around an assumption that newbies are very afraid of a command line.

I'm thinking of NT and Win2K in particular, but it seems to be true in general.

Bash and Fileutils have been ported to DOS (you'll need at least bsh204b.zip, fil316.zip, and txt20b.zip to get a useful shell). So has a lot of other GNU software; start with DJGPP, the DOS port of GCC.

Install Red Hat Cygwin and you get Bash, GCC, and other things you may be used to on GNU/Linux, BSD, or UNIX systems.

Looks like the SIMTEL20 archives live on at http://www.simtel.net/simtel.net/.

Some anonymous coward wrote:

IRC does not scale

Doesn't scale? Actually, in some ways I'd say IRC scales better...if the traffic gets excessive, people start new servers on the network which are closer. (I'd say it scales approximately as well as large FTP sites like Simtel or Freshmeat; Freshmeat in particular is actually mirrored on a large number of sites and one is routed to a server semi-local to one.)

IRC does not have a user registration system

Depends on the network, actually. The largest IRC network admittedly has no facilities for nick registration (then again, the largest IRC network is next to useless for many reasons). Second- and third-generation IRC networks, such as DALnet and SorceryNet have NickServ programs that allow registration of nicks...if someone else tries to logon with your nick, they have to give your password within 30 seconds or their nick gets autochanged. (You can also specify hosts that don't have to give a password.)

IRC does not have offline messaging

Again, this varies with IRC network and server. IRC servers on DALnet, SorceryNet, and other networks that use the DALnet server software do have offline messaging capability as long as your nick has been registered. The tool is called MsgServ, and when someone logs on they'll get a message to the effect "x messages are waiting for you. Type /msg MsgServ read 1 to start reading".

IRC servers periodically split off because of the massive amount of traffic since IRC as a protocol forwards every single message, not just the ones the people on the other server are interested in seeing

I've got some news for you...so does AIM. So does ICQ. The servers by definition carry every message on them, not just the ones one is interested in seeing! You just see the ones you're interested in seeing because you're in a chatroom (the exact equivalent of a room on IRC) or you are in private chat with a person on your Buddy list (the exact equivalent of either private chat (/msg) or DCC chat in IRC).

The real reason IRC tends to lag is because of network conditions in GENERAL on modern IRC networks (like Undernet and DALnet and SorceryNet). They often have to cross country and worse...AOL actually uses multiple servers for AIM (and I expect for ICQ as well) but they're located in two or three places. I'll also note that IRC networks with two or three servers almost never experience lag problems; I've not yet run into serious lag on SorceryNet, for instance.

As a minor aside...I have run into problems with network lag with ICQ (at times I honestly wish you could select the server you connect to; sometimes ICQ is so slow as to be unusable) and I know folks who've run into it with AIM too. The problem isn't exclusive to IRC. Just three problems, I can easily give you a hundred more if you like.

Most of the problems I've seen with IRC versus "chat clients" such as AIM or ICQ mostly occur on EFnet (a first-generation IRC network which is mostly plagued by script kiddies). Modern servers such as DALnet and SorceryNet (and networks and private IRC servers using the DALnet ircii server) generally do not have the problems with script-kiddies and people on kick-frenzies, and have security for nicks and channels as well as less problems with netsplits. (And yes, I've seen the equivalent of netsplits on other chat clients; with ICQ "netsplits" you generally are unable to talk to the person even though they are still online.)

In fact, I'll even go so far as to note that there are problems with AIM and ICQ that do not exist on third-generation IRC systems. Firstly, it is well known that the name registration in both AIM and ICQ are insecure and it is possible to spoof nicks (BUGTRAQ has good info on vulnerabilities in the clients). Secondly, it is more difficult to secure non-private chatrooms in AIM (ICQ's chats are, essentially, the equivalent of invite-only IRC rooms; third- and even second-gen IRC servers allow one to set a room's mode automatically to only allow certain people in, or only allow certain people to post, and keep those configurations fairly permanently set even when one is not on IRC). Thirdly, you're relying on protocols which are largely proprietary and (as is being shown by the entire AIM debacle) permission for clones to operate can be revoked at a moment's notice leaving you to either buy a client from a proprietary vendor (if you use Windoze or maybe MacOS) or leaving you essentially SOL (if you use Linux or any other OS, or if you don't like giving AOL your dime so they can keep sending coasters, er, "try out AOL free for thirty days" CDs). It is rather difficult to start one's own ICQ server, and probably impossible to start one's own AIM server, if you don't like AOL's policies.

Other chat clients are even worse. Ichat, a common "web chat" util, pretty much has equivalent function to IRC but with none of the security features of even first-generation IRC servers...I personally have seen script-kiddies spoof nicks, do kicks of entire channels, effectively take over entire servers, commit DoS attacks on users...and there is no way to set operator status on a channel (it's only server-wide, the equivalent of an IRCOp) and no way to protect users or channels from this sort of sillybuggers (not even bots to guard a channel).

With IRC, on the other hand...third-gen clients allow all of the features of ICQ or AIM, with more security. IRC is an open protocol; clients are available for damn near every system under the sun (including DOS boxen as low as 8086's and old Amigas), most IRC servers are open-source (the complete source for the DALnet server, the base for most third-gen IRC servers, is available from their website; it's basically a version of the regular EPIC ircii server with extra features), and if you don't like the policies a server or network is doing you can get with friends and start your own server (this is exactly how SorceryNet started, btw; they thought DALnet's admins were being right bastards, so they took their toys and started their own network).

The only problem is there are several IRC networks. I do know that at least some folks are working on various ways of letting them talk to each other, though...this includes gateways (I knew a person working on an experimental DALnet/ SorceryNet gateway, for instance) and clients that allow people even on different services to talk to each other (in essence the clients act as IRC/AIM/ICQ/whatever gateways).