History of TurboIRC

TurboIRC 98

TurboIRC 98, released in late 1998, was my first big project; A newbie in C++ and Windows programming, back in the forgotten Windows 95 era; TurboIRC 98 had a few, but innovative features, including special chat effects. Made in Borland C++ 5.02 and OWL, TurboIRC 98 was the most featured IRC client even at that time.

TurboIRC 98 setup was 3,4 MB and the executable file was TURBOIRC.EXE.

TurboIRC 98 Splash Screen

TurboIRC 98 Icon:

TurboIRC 2000

TurboIRC 2000, released in early 2000, was essentially a major upgrade of TurboIRC 98 with more features and fixed requests. It was also the first time that the auto-update feature was used. I use this feature in all my projects since then.

TurboIRC 2000 setup was 1,9MB and the executable was named TIRC2000.EXE

TurboIRC 2000 splash screen

TurboIRC 3

TurboIRC 3, was a rewrite from scratch, and it was released in 2001. All technologies found in TurboIRC 3, 2004, 5 and 6, including skins, plugins, scripts, toolbars, auto update and more, were initially created in 3. Rewrite in C, no more OWL, Win32 native code.

TurboIRC 3 setup was 1,3 MB, and the executable name was T3.EXE.

Splash screen in TurboIRC 3.

TurboIRC 3 Icon .

TurboIRC 2004

TurboIRC 2004, was more or less a refresh of TurboIRC 3, taking advantage of the new features of the new OS Windows XP at that time. Dedicated to the Athens 2004 Olympiad, TurboIRC 2004 setup was 1MB, with WinRAR for the first time, and the executable was named T.EXE.

TurboIRC 4 Icon :

TurboIRC 5

TurboIRC 5, installed new features such as acount manager, enhanced logging, encryption, security, voice messages and more.
TurboIRC 5 also created a new interface with new toolbars and icons. Its size was 1MB, released in 2005.

TurboIRC 5 Icon:

TurboIRC 6

TurboIRC 6, installed even more new features such as extended skins, mixed encodigs, advanced scripts, external commands and more, making it the most powerful IRC client you had until December 2007. TurboIRC 6 was created with Borland C++ Builder (my last Borland project), and its size was 1,2 MB. The executable was still T.EXE

TurboIRC 6 Icon:

TurboIRC 7, is not anymore a descendant of TurboIRCs. It is a completely new program, rewritten from scratch, using new technologies (XML,Trees,User-Dependency,Custom Security) and compiler (Visual Studio) to bring you the best IRC features you 'd ever imagined!

TurboIRC 7 Icon: