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Creator of Relay On BITNET, Predecessor of IRC, Dies (blogs.com)

tmjva writes: Jeff Kell passed away on November 25 as reported here in the 3000newswire. He was inventor of BITNET Relay, a predecessor of Internet Relay Chat using the REXX programming language.

In 1987 he wrote the following preserved article about RELAY and here is his obituary. May this early inventor rest in peace.

34 comments

  1. No Relay to Great Beyond by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Goodbye and thank you Jeff, wherever you are.

    1. Re:No Relay to Great Beyond by rjr3 · · Score: 2

      smsg rscs cmd ....

      what fond, fond memories ...

    2. Re: No Relay to Great Beyond by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      /quit

  2. oh no! by Limitless_Potential · · Score: 2, Funny

    IRC better start worrying, its next in line for the chop

    1. Re:oh no! by sims+2 · · Score: 1

      Afaik irc is still fairly popular. I figure cable tv will go first.

      --
      Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    2. Re:oh no! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      What IRC needs is social media integration. And the possibility to login with your Facebook or Google+ account. *Ducks*

    3. Re:oh no! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To me it seems like there might be a significant number of people still using it, but that in terms of percentages, very few people use it or have even heard of it for that matter. Sometimes when people want to talk to me I'll suggest IRC, and have never gotten anything but a blank look. Everybody is using stuff like Snapchat now, or some other things a lot like that.

    4. Re:oh no! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Heh - well, your joking comment aside, the sad reality is that FB-federated login probably would reverse the slide into irrelevance that IRC met.

    5. Re:oh no! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      KIK is the big dog.

    6. Re:oh no! by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      The college students I work with all seem to be on Snapchat and Skype - mostly at the same time. The only people I know who are on IRC are unix sysadmins - that's their social network.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    7. Re:oh no! by jonwil · · Score: 1

      IRC is still very popular with open source software developers. Many open source projects have channels on freenode or elsewhere.

      What does seem to have vanished is the days of connecting to an IRC server to pull down pirated crap (BitTorrent and p2p killed that off)

    8. Re:oh no! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I quit using IRC about 15 yrs ago because it was the same shit over and over again.

    9. Re:oh no! by drinkypoo · · Score: 0

      I quit using IRC about 15 yrs ago because it was the same shit over and over again.

      You might as well kill yourself, because life is more than a bit samey, too. Every day I get up, take a shower, make breakfast... I could go on but isn't the point made? Admittedly, I don't irc any more either, but that's because I get the same shit over and over again from social networking and no longer need irc.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Re:WHO CARES by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He was a white boy. Even worse, he was an old white boy. his life did not matter does not, and never did mater. You know who's life does matter? Black lives matter. If you ain't black (or a member of another protected disefranchised minority class) your wack. All you racists need to start putting the stories in context of the stories greater affect on disenfranchised black latino transgendered African Americans living in a zone that will be shortly reclaimed by the ocean due to global warming.

    For your own sake, please seek professional mental health care without delay. President Obama has made it available to people like you who need it.

  4. Re:WHO CARES by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The problem with parodies like this is that - like Harrison Bergeron written as a mockery of Red Scare now taken as an anti-egalitarian screed - soon people start to take the message seriously.

  5. predecessor? by fleabay · · Score: 1

    /me doesn't like the use of the word predecessor here.

    1. Re:predecessor? by Mr.+Slippery · · Score: 1

      /me doesn't like the use of the word predecessor here.

      "A model or type of machinery or device which precedes the current one. Usually used to describe an earlier, outdated model." Seem entirely appropriate.

      --
      Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
      You cannot wash away blood with blood
    2. Re:predecessor? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Especially since those Republicans hate us and want us to die.

  6. A host is a host by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A host is a host from coast to coast
    unless the host that isn't close
    is busy, hung or dead.

    that is how I remember it, does someone remember it better?

    1. Re:A host is a host by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A quick google shows the answer is:

      A host is a host from coast to coast
      & no one will talk to a host that's close
      Unless the host (that isn't close)
      is busy, hung or dead

    2. Re:A host is a host by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Holy shit, I remember reading that in .sigs on usenet back in the... 80's was it?

      Was Jeff Kell the guy who wrote that? Ah, no... looks rather like it was Mike O’Brien?

  7. Re:WHO CARES by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    who's means who is. your means your banana, not you are. Affect is an emotion, you mean effect.

  8. Incorrect headline by kevmeister · · Score: 4, Informative

    As is all too common these days, both the summary and article are right, but the headline is wrong. Jeff Kell did not invent BITNET (Because It's Time NETwork or Because It's There NETwork). BITNET was developed in the early '80s by Ira Fuchs of CUNY and Greydon Freeman, Inc. of Yale. It was an early store and forward network based on IBM protocols.

    Both the summary and article correctly credit Jeff with the invention of BITNET RELAY which was a predecessor of IRC. It was important, but was just a component of BITNET.

    --
    Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
    1. Re:Incorrect headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yo! Schmuck! Read it AGAIN and weep!

    2. Re:Incorrect headline by tmjva · · Score: 1

      When I submitted the article, it was about inventing RELAY on BITNET. Not BITNET itself. Did not mean to confuse.

      --
      Tracy Johnson
      Old fashioned text games hosted below:
      http://empire.openmpe.com/
      BT
  9. Re:Frost Pist by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1

    Dumbass trolls haven't even realized the domain expired and its a landing page.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  10. Re:Frost Pist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ah, the classic BSD spam. It seems to haunt Slashdot year after year.

  11. Re:WHO CARES by r.freeman · · Score: 1

    So true.
    In our sad, PC world.
    And not the PC that we have instead Amiga ;)

  12. Immortality is others memory of ourselves.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Very sad news. I knew Jeff well (back in Bitnet days.) His legacy is and will live on, certainly.

  13. last chat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this *net*split won't reconnect ...

  14. Wow. I'm glad others remember. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The closest I ever came to an Internet romance was on BITNET. It started on Relay, advanced to phone calls, and even an exchange of pictures (Polaroids through snail mail).

    Was it serious? Well, it was enough to get me to keep logging on to IBM timesharing, when I was a dyed-in-the-wool VMS partisan.

  15. Oh, fond memories! by treczoks · · Score: 1

    Back in ye olden times, fond memories of hours lost at a green serial terminal, TALKing to peope all over the world.

    When things worked solely by agreement, i.e. if you registered your nick at some server (IIRC NICKSERV), it was yours, and nobody touched it.