Not sure if this is the best spot for this post, but getting an IRC server working on an 8088 is something I've wanted to do for a long time. I know that's maybe a little bit of an odd thing to want to do, but IRC servers are very interactive with people chatting on them all the time, so it makes these old systems feel "useful" to me I guess beyond just retrogaming.

I recently found a pretty lightweight one that's fully RFC compatible, with a few extra features that are common now. So it's a full-blown IRCd. Alex Barton's ngIRCd. I ported it to DOS with Open Watcom and used Mike Brutman's mTCP network stack. I had to write some wrappers and make some modifications both to help it fit in the memory constraints better and because it was obviously written for Unix-y sockets, which mTCP is not.

It's working though! I've got it up and running on an ITT turbo XT clone with an 8088 @ 10 MHz. I'm trying to give it a little bit of a workout, so if anybody wants to drop in and say hi, it's online at irc.xtulator.com port 6667. There are a few of us who like old computery things hanging out there already in channel #640KB -- I'd like to see how it holds up to a few more people!

It really is a full IRCd, so that means server link support and all. We have services working. Those are running on a modern system though.

Haven't released a binary or source yet, still very experimental and doing testing... this may very well crash and burn, we'll see!