2026-03-12 11:15 UTC
In early 1985, Henry Nussbacher sent a letter to all Bitnet contacts calling for admins to hunt down and destroy every chat server because a dozen users actively chatting could bring file transfers to a halt—file transfers being the primary purpose of the network.
Jeff Kell realized that the problem wasn't chatting itself, but redundant traffic from independent connections. So he built the first Relay chat system. I got involved in August, setting up the 10th relay server and contributing code.
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@kcase@mastodon.social 2026-03-12 11:34
Through August we started seeing as many as 20 users chatting on relay at the same time. By the end of 1985, we were averaging daily peaks of 50 users or so, sometimes reaching 80. This started taking up way too much CPU on some of the servers (like Bitnic), so they started shutting it down for days at a time. But while not running a local relay reduced CPU load, it placed more burden on the network again: users didn't stop chatting, they would just find a more distant relay to use.