Undernet was established in October 1992 by Danny Mitchell, Donald Lambert, and Laurent Demally as an experimental network running a modified version of the EFnet irc2.7 IRCd software, created in an attempt to make it less bandwidth-consumptive and less chaotic, as netsplits and takeovers were starting to plague EFnet.
It is notable as being the first network to utilize timestamping, originally made by Carlo Wood, in the IRC server protocol as a means to curb abuse.