EdgeIRC

EdgeIRC was an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client that I wrote in mid-1996 using Java. One of the major design goals of EdgeIRC was to provide many powerful capabilities that other IRC clients didn't have, such as "retroactive logging" and unusually effective "electronic countermeasures," which necessitated that the EdgeIRC client maintain a detailed model of the IRC world.

One of the reasons I wrote EdgeIRC in Java was to demonstrate that Java could be used for nontrivial applications development. At the time, it seemed that virtually everyone who had heard of Java thought it was only for embedded animations in Web pages.

Though I did get Java (JDK 1.0) to do what I needed with GUI, multithreading, networking, etc., the JDK wasn't really ready for prime-time. The Java AWT had clearly been rushed for shipment — it had good design in parts, but many other things were kludged. The widget set itself was also impoverished. I ended up implementing my own resizable scrollable text widgets that supported colors and boxed text. (Though AWT can't be faulted for not having such a thing, I also implemented tiling window management and shading of inactive windows, which were really beneficial for some patterns of IRC usage.)

I did three limited releases of EdgeIRC in Jul-1996 to a small group of friends and acquaintances, and later revived some of the code for Butterfly.