15 July 2005 — 15 July 2025 — Today is the 20th anniversary of BlaatSchaap. 20 Years ago, Nuky and Andre decided to split off from the SkyOS community, to become BlaatSchaap. Even though, at that hour, the name wasn’t decided yet, the moment we decided to split off is seen as the founding date of BlaatSchaap.

The SkyOS chatroom, that’s where it all started. I think I should mention, all of this happened on IRC. BlaatSchaap is most and for all a chatroom. The SkyOS chatroom. SkyOS was an alternative operating system, and the members of the chatroom were beta-testers of the said operating system. When a new build was dropped, the chatroom was buzzing with activity with people testing the new build. However, said activity would drop to non-existent after a few days. In this idle channel, some people, including Nuky and Andre would start discussing off-topic things. The moderators didn’t like this much, and, for some reason, did pick on Nuky for this, but didn’t seem to have an issue of Andre or one of the others taking part of said off-topic discussion.

Nuky being banned and exiled to the #skyos_offtopic chatroom, being created at that moment, for that purpose. People from #skyos joined #skyos_offtopic. After a while we decided to no longer be associated with #skyos and started a new channel. That’s how BlaatSchaap started. When it started, it was on the IndreaNET network, the same network as the #SkyOS chatroom was on. Near the end of 2005, this server went unstable, frequently dropping connection. Therefore we decided to move to a different server. Since both Nuky and Andre were on the Chat4All Network, we decided to move there.

Over there, in the #pctrouble chatroom, a helpdesk channel, in contrast to the policy at skyos, off-topic talk was accepted. However, that does not mean there were no clashes with moderators. In this case, Gunirus was not liked my the mods, and so, Andre invited Gunirus over to #blaatschaap, and some others followed.

So, BlaatSchaap came to be a mix of people from two chatrooms, where some people clashed with the moderators, but weren’t considered to be misbehaving by other members of their rooms.

While the chatroom on IRC was the main place, BlaatSchaap also got some website. In the early days, the BlaatSchaap forum was at a subdomain on Nuky’s domain, blaatschaap.nukysrealm.net. Nearing BlaatSchaap’s first anniversary, the blaatschaap.be domain was purchased. Why .be? At the time .nl was taken, .org was taken, and sheep go bèèè, don’t they? So .be it is.

We’ve been running e107 for a while. the 0.6 series of that software seemed fine, but after an upgrade to the 0.7 series, things didn’t work as nice as they once did. For a while we had a nulled version of phpfox on the website, and then, in 2008, something home made was created. In 2010 the development of a second iteration of the BlaatSchaap
website started. However, due a server crash in 2011 this was never finished, and only earlier versions of that software survived.

Due to this server crash in 2011, the BlaatSchaap website ceased to exist. As the 2010’s progressed, the chatroom went quiet. Most of us were students when it all started, and growing up, graduating, getting a job, it seems we all grew apart. The BlaatSchaap website was replaced by a blog.

Then came this year, 2020, the pandemic. Curfews and such. Everyone forced to stay at home. That’s when Andre decided to revive his hobby of online radio. Radio BlaatSchaap was revived, and as result, so was BlaatSchaap.

And now, 5 years later, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of BlaatSchaap, and now, it’s alive again. New people, in a different age, but in the same spirit.