Beej is often on here and can confirm the actual inception date, but iirc I used it as far back as at least 1999/2000ish

Indeed! I remember first seeing it in late 2000 or early 2001, and it wasn't brand new at that time.

I used it as a companion to Richard Stevens' classics on TCP/IP.

From his bio:

> I'd started off with Beej's Guide to Network Programming back in 1995 or so

I don't remember if I said, but I got started learning this stuff from a networking program someone had written to allow you to play DOOM over the modem, IIRC. So thank you to whomever that was!

And thank you for writing the networking guide. I found it in my early teens when I was interested in learning programming and wanted to go beyond the basics to do some more interesting stuff.

It helped me write some chatroom bots for things like IRC and battle.net in the early 2000s, which fueled the hobby even more and eventually turned it into a very good career. :)

Yeah! Last week I decided I'd like to write a (very) simple HTTP server in C as a learning experiment. The network programming guide was incredibly useful and the code examples gave me a great base to learn from and extend.