- The speaker that is giving a talk about the thing wears a beard, hand-spun linen pants and weilds a thinkpad
- Docs website is XHTML 1.0-compliant and features an extensive table of clients for the thing
- Most of those clients are dead
- Three most popular living ones are under GPL
- The thing itself was written in APL but was rewritten in Common Lisp
- Weird hotkeys and outdated conventions
- IRC chatrooms