I think it was Efnet #warez channel that pointed me towards the right places to learn some software in high school, and that wound up getting me so far ahead working with CAD that it undoubtedly was the reason I got a full ride scholarship to an engineering university that I never would have be able to afford tuition to otherwise.

A random guy on another channel heard about how I was struggling to run certain things because my family couldn't afford anything newer than an old 486 with 8MB of RAM, on a motherboard that didn't support any modern graphics cards and at that point was barely able to run Windows. This person, whom I didn't know other than just a screen name and chatting about Paintball, just straight up sent me an entire motherboard, RAM, and CPU combo in the mail; A relatively new at the time AMD Athlon, on a motherboard with an AGP slot, so I could finally get a modern 3D graphics accelerator. Nothing asked in return, just 'here ya go kid, make good use of it'.

These two events when put together essentially changed the course of my life more than almost anything else, and both happened on IRC.

My dad acquired a dozen identical PCs from decommissioned office equipment at his workplace (very old machines slated for disposal). As a kid in a rural area, I had neither the money nor the means to obtain the necessary router to build the Beowulf cluster I'd been mentioning on a random IRC channel. Then, one day, a quiet "greybeard" who mostly lurked in the logs pinged me out of blue, asked for my address, and sent me his old 5-port router from Germany. This felt incredibly significant because even people who had interacted with him online for over a decade knew nothing beyond his screen name, yet here I was, holding a box with his full name and address.

This gesture, combined with the philosophy and work ethic of him and other greybeards that I deeply admired, literally changed the course of my life. By the time I reached high school, I already had an impressive portfolio of hardware and software projects, spoke fluent English, and was freelancing for amounts that exceeded my father's salary. IRC turned out to be an incredible ROI for me :p

My early software and skills life happened around some late stages of BBS and IRC, and yes, #warez.

I met some absolutely wonderful people from online, and even got to spend some quality time with some very high end hardware that couldn't be gifted, but was effectively almost unlimited, and people with appropriate skills and compassion to match. My early career and schooling made no use of those skills, but once I found my jam a little later on that knowledge still proved to be incredibly important and put me leaps and bounds ahead of my peers, and it's been an amazing ride ever since.

Wow, that must have blown your hair back quite a bit! Thanks for sharing the story. I had a similar upgrade path and that was such a huge leap forward.