Well Blastnet was started as an alternative to undernet in 1996 when internet was still in its childhood. It was started by Hawkie and was populated with friends from the whole world. In the beginning we had 4 servers all on dialup connections, something that proved to be very expensive in the long run. Hawkie, [Apache] (today in ircworld.org), and Thorn was the network admins. The network had a philosophy on beeing the friendly network. The network had at this time a core of 40 users, where 50% was from Estonia and the rest was from the US and Scandinavia. Wizkid (Kris O'Kelly) was starting his server on a dialup as well, however he soon found out how expensive this was. In 1997 after almost a year on a dialup 33.600 connetion (that was really fast at that time), Hawkie got his first perm line at home. It was a huge improvement and his 128 kbps (at this time the undernet's biggest server had the same connection speed) surprised and stunned our competing networks. This again added to increased stability and a fast growing user base. At the peak level this year, Blastnet had 250 users wich was a revolution on IRC networks outside undernet. Early this year at the same time as Hawkie got his perm line, we also got our official network Name: Blastnet.org - And we even got our webpages up and running. This year was a year with a lot of growth and a peaceful Blastnet Universe. One of our most active members (also an ircop) Parity (now known as Marquis on ircworld) founded Bane Coders Software, a union of programmers. This union also brought us some new users. As the network grew, the servers also increased in numbers, but the problem was that most was on dialup and limited bandwith. We had started with Conference Room 1.1 as our server software and that was a good choice for us inexperienced Linux users. But this gave us another problem, the software wasnt capable of beeing stable with many servers online. We found many ways to compensate for this and kept on running the network. The user base started shifting to be a lot of Estonian users as Estonia didnt have any IRC servers locally. This proved to be good at the same time as it also proved to be a problem regarding the official laguage of the network. Well after some discussions the network decided to have English as it's official language. The year 1998 came with a lot of surprises and with new challenges. At this time we also received some new requests from other networks to merge, and we decided to merge with one of them. This merger proved to be a disaster since the merging network had a totally other way of doing things than us. The other network was full of conflicts and leadership battle's. After only 2 months Blastnet was put in the place where it either had to join in an unfair action against one the other networks servers (danurve's) or to split from them. Blastnet council (Hawkie, [Apache], Wizkid)decided that we would not let a leadership struggle have us beeing part of such actions, so we decided to split. With us we then got danurve, whom soon was to be an active part of the network. His server was on a perm line and was a fine addition to the network. His server officially became: us.blastnet.org . At this time Bilbo (one of the Estonian ircops) also registered Blastnet.ee (eaten by ircworld.org today) and the network grew fast. The growth however caused a lot of work for the already overworked staff, and in the mid 2000 Hawkie had to take a break. His server went offline, and the network admins started fighting amongst themselves. Danurve decided to split and founded thedge.cc , and some of the others founded ircworld.org. Late 2000 Hawkie returned to keep on the work with the network and found that it was split up. He worked on re-creating the old network, but differences was to big to make this happen. After a period of thinking Hawkie joined danurve at thedge.cc and helped build this up. Together danurve and Hawkie had 2 servers with an average of 200 users. Until this time daNurVE had good help from Pam and Belgarion on running the server. Blanquito (now Raudmees) and Cybercon was also important in building thedge.cc up to what it was at this time. In the late 2001 danurve's server was victim of a security bug in the server software and he was severely attacked and decided to take his server offline. Hawkie stayed up with good help from the thedge.cc ircops and after consulting with the remaining opers he took back the old Blastnet name. After a short break danurve returned with his thedge.cc server and stayed as a part of the network once again. This was the start of a fast growing period in the history of the network. We soon doubled and tripled the amount of users, something that in great part was due to the hard work from the ircops and the hard working server admins. The servers was beeing modified to more powerful machines and lines where upgraded to meet the fast growth. Today we look proudly back to a network that has been able to survive, and with servers that have given thousands of registered users a good place to chat. This is a service we are proud to deliver, and we promise that we will be even better in the future. As an end to the story we wish to mention all the people that have helped build this network, and we will try to list them all here, and some are still with us, and some are not: [Apache], Parity, Thorn, Bilbo, Wizkid, Typhoon, python, Belgarion, Phreaky, danurve, Hawkie, jonn, Blanquito, Cybercon, Pam, fat, Eraser. And a lot more i cant remember the nicks of at this moment. And i also want to express my best of luck to all our old friends running ircworld.org and others we have met in the years. Me and Belgarion talked about some of those we miss, and we must admit that we have met a lot of great people from all over the world while we have been working on Blastnet. And i hope we also have made the Blastnet spirit as the friendly network a part of their lives as well. Knowing all the people that have moved on, i must say: thanks for spending part of your life with us, we love you all. And most of all, you the users are what makes us what we are. Thank you for helping us be what we are.