The history of ICB.

In the Spring of 1989 Sean Casey (sean) released the first fn (forumnet) client for general use. For a while, it was widely used by users at the University of Kentucky (uky.edu) (where the server was located: j.ms.uky.edu), MIT, UC Santa Cruz, the University of New Mexico, and Georgia Tech. Many other sites ran the client as well, but these were the big ones. During the following summer a T-shirt of the US, mapping sites that had been using fn, was done by Stephen Chappell (tmdando, urso). The first large gathering of Forumnet users was also that summer, at the house shared by Stephen and Glenn Stone (net.bot, taliesin) (the house was nicknamed "Farside"). Fn users from Atlanta, as well as Jennifer Moody (jenalen) and Carolee Harrison (thrush, didthat, carolee) from UC Santa Cruz, were at the party. It was also during this summer that Mark Reed (Dr.Strange) and Eric Lechner (lechner, eriq) started working on their own versions of the client (labeled the .mr and .el clients).

The following fall, when the earthquake of 89 hit the San Francisco bay area, fn users from around the country pooled information and distributed it across fn. Some users organized care packages for Bay area fn users. Since some UCSC students still had net access, but no phones, some fn users even fowarded phone messages to family members.

Shortly after the earthquake was the second gathering of fn users. The Atlanta fn users had a Halloween party at Farside. David Nye (evil, DavE) and Sean brought a contigent of UK users with them.

In November of 90 there was another gathering of fn users. This time it was on the West coast. It was hosted at the house of mofo, icecube, and wade (their icb nicks). People from UC Davis, Oregon State, University of Oregon, Berkeley, UCSC, and Stanford attended (a total of about 50-75 people). There were lots of bands there, beer, BBQ, and a Loony Toon movie marathon. This was probably the largest fn/icb gathering to date.

In March of 1991, for various reasons, Forumnet was taken down. During the interum 2 to 3 months, former fn users used IRC and Netchat to keep in touch. Then, John Atwood Devries (at, zozzles, @, others) used the fn client to reverse engineer a server. He named the new setup "International CB" or ICB for short. The ICB server at alderon.lanl.gov worked with fn clients that were modified for the new host address. Later, icb clients were writen which allowed command-line specification of server names. For a while, the client was offically maintained by Mark Giaquinto (winterwolf). Currently, Mark Reed does most of the work on the unix client, and there are also emacs and VMS clients based clients.

Because of laws related to use of government property, the alderon server had to be shutdown. The server was moved to remus.rutgers.edu by Jessica Koeppel Dembski (jessica). Another server was put up at a site in Germany, as well as the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (by Tom J. Kreuger ( VetPsychWars)). David Galbrath (thunderstorm) also brought up a server at bootes.unm.edu.

The server at bootes ("The Dragon Server" or "bootes") had a lot of work done on it. At one point, David was even trying to get his server to talk directly to the other servers. Later, this server was moved to crater.unm.edu Eventually, all of the other servers went away, as bootes was the most reliable and featureful of the lot. Since then, some other servers have appeared at various sites for local use, or use when the Dragon Server is down.

In the summer of 1993, the icb-social mailing list arranged the first ICB Bash party. The bash had ICB users from all over the east coast. The following May, a "bashlet" was held in the Washington DC area. The ICB Bash-II was held on the 4th of July weekend 1994 in Milwaukee.

In the Summer of 1994, John Rudd (kzin) decided to learn html. He also thought that ICB needed a homepage. The reaction to this announcement was mixed. Some of the ICB community wants ICB to remain a small, lesser known part of the net, so that all of the obnoxious newbies head to IRC. Some of the rest of the ICB community wanted to see ICB on the web. John went ahead and created the first draft of this document on July 15, 1994.

In the fall of 1994, Ed Boykin (Ham_Salad) added his name to the list of people working on ICB clients. Ed started work on the OS/2 version of the client (called ICB/2).

ICB still has a large following at UCSC and Georgia Tech. Users still log in from around the world (although, lately, few people from outside the US use ICB). New sites find their way to ICB all the time. Mills College is another large user, and the University of Idaho (in Moscow, Idaho) is one of the newer sites with many users.