Dear visitor,

Join us in #cy and #cyprus, the officially registered channels of the Island of Cyprus on the IRC (Undernet).

People say that these channels are among the most fast growing channels on the IRC. Do a “/join #cyprus” or “/join #cy” on Undernet, and find out why!

Do send us your picture and data for this site.

Have fun :)

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After accumulating information from some people, who pioneered the formation of a separate channel on the IRC, concerning Cyprus, we have come up to the channel's history, which we present to you in the form of what those people said.

 If any one of you has something to add, to make #cyprus history more comprehensive, please email us. All your experiences concerning those first days of #cyprus on IRC are most welcomed, and will be included in this page.

 It seems that the first signs of #cyprus on IRC are coming from 1994, but the channel was officially registered on the 29th of January, 1996.

 Aeras was actually the user who officially registered the channel.
 He quotes:
 " After strolling around in Dalnet and messing with nickserv and chanserv I thought of joining Undernet and see who was there for chatting. What? No #cyprus channel? ... impossible! Well, there is #hellas, let's join there. Nobody that I know of, not a cypriot in sight, where is everybody? Hmmmm. Now is the time for #cyprus to take a share of the undernet.

 Anyone out there to help me create such a channel? Nope. I'll have to get things started really fast, cause some turks are lurking out there, trying to beat me to it!

 Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler cought fire by the IRC docs that I was pointed to. Reading and reading and reading, testing, reading again, asking IRC operators....night after night, I was trying to make it happen in less than a week. After some mail I sended to the whole Logos.Net, some people backed me up, for creating the channel. After this, #cyprus was a realithy.

 At first it was all checking. After that I found that everything was easy. @X was not helping much, but what the hell :) The first person to reside in the channel more time than me was...Tequila. Wow! Even 5 in the morning he was up there! I was amazed! In that early time I had to have some people to be auto-oped in the channel, in order to help me run #cyprus smoothly. Tequila was an obvious choice. Before I knew his age, I thought I was speaking with a 30 year old, I gasped after learning the real number...17!

 Mapleleaf was next, VERY KEEN with IRC, very panctual and efficient. Flyer had to get administrator access because of knowledge and experiense (and cause he had the same surname as mine::)))

 One thing I did learn the hard way is that, managing a channel is not an easy job to do, managing a popular one is a real challenge."

Aera's application reply:
----------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 11:19:13 -0500
To: charlie@logos.hol.gr
Content-Length: 22402
This is inform you that your channel applications have been accepted.
-----------------------------------------------------------
 )))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) right! ..... we are home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 Tequila was among the first ones to be on the channel, and with his great help, patience and knowledge, he helped a lot, back on those days, and he still is.
 He quotes:
 "When I first started joining the IRC, I always used to join #hellas. Many times I could find a lot of other people from Cyprus in there, and sometimes, when we were a lot of us online, we were joining a channel we dynamically formed, the #cyprus channel. It was more or less like this that the #cyprus channel started to be formed. The first log file I'm having from #cyprus is dated at January 9th, 1996, and it is between me and "sony", a Cypriot guy that is studying in the UK, and he is now occasionally joining #cyprus. It was a common aggreement to /join #cyprus back at that time, but we were mainly talking in #hellas, since there were still not a lot of people in #cyprus. The first people that I remember coming often in the #cyprus channel, were apart from myself, marios, kon, and kramvis.

 Meanwhile, I had heard from marios that another user, called aeras, had sent an application for officially registering the channel, although I had not seen aeras on-line, until then.

 Btw, it's quite exciting to review the log files of the channel! According to my log-files, ZorbaTG first appeared in the channel on the 29th of January, 1996. It was on the 5th of February, 1996 that I first saw @X on the channel, as well as aeras. At the 5th of February, was the first time that ZorbaTG first mentioned COCO69, but at that time he referenced her with her other nickname, Zorbette. It was then that he first mentioned that their story seems like "Sleepless in Seattle", the movie.

 Things evolved quite normal from that time on. I was spending a lot of hours in #cyprus, and aeras trusted me, and gave me an auto-op status. Among the first people I had met in #cyprus was ZorbaTG and Alexis, apart the others whom I already knew.

 Ever since, #cyprus is gaining more and more users, and supporters. An imporant event in the brief history of #cyprus were the elections we had in February, for the voting of 4 more auto-operators. Fytos, ZorbaTG, Marios and COCO69 were elected."

Panayiotis Zaphiris, the creator of the excellent pages on Cyprus, quotes:
The #cyprus channel first started in 1994, after some attempts from the members of the Cyprus ListCyprus-L Then, it was down for some period.

Ipermachos (Machos) Makris states:

“Just because i checked out your home page and so some very mistaken comments i thought i should set the record straight.

We have had our #cyprus channel on irc since 1992, not on undernet, not on dalnet, but on efnet, as all of the users were studying in the US at the time. All of us were simply using the #hellas channel whenever we felt like getting company from people speaking our own language, and in late 1992 I started the first #cyprus channel.  It was followed soon by another channel called #kypros, where we would all also hang out. I used to also have a "bot" in these channels for protection, and bots like mine would stay in the channel at all times, from multiple locations thus maintaining the security of the channel. Something you guys have not managed to understand the importance of in undernet. I also remember, one of the bots, which I named "koumpara" managed to hold the #turkey channel (katalnpsn!) for a whole week, and thus the turks started using #turkiye..which after a few days koumpara was the owner off too...making ALL turks in efnet proudly homeless!

My good friend Zaphiris, never really joined us in irc, but instead he always kept busy with his home pages on Cyprus. By the way did I mention that I created the FIRST Cyprus soccer team home page? And I was only the second person ..after Panayiotis, to create a page related to Cyprus...the page of AEK KITION.

That's all I have to say about the history of #cyprus on the efnet...so that you guys will understand that it's been around, we've been around for quite a few years now. Irc is NOT a new thing to Cyprus.

Thanks for your time.
Ipermachos (Machos) Makris”

I have no reason to disagree with my friend Machos about the history of #cyprus. I was not aware of the existence of a #cyprus channel on irc before 1994. Good

Panayiotis

You may submit your own experiences, concerning the history of #cyprus, #cy or other channels concerning the island of Cyprus.

These pages are maintained by ZorbaTG with the close assistance of COCO69. You are most welcomed to send in your comments and suggestions for the improvement of the site.