2004/2005. I remember running a vb6 MDK (which wasn't actually by MDK - but was created by Joeh and Johno) emulator and posted the link on SOM index page. Then the source code got released, and we modded it.... which was then pretty much the start of the retro evolution (and holy shit, look what...
It's actually a lot harder for developers with the new rawInt and rawString etc protocol... One wrong move (I.E missing a string, missing an integer or using a Boolean in place of a short etc) and the client will crash... With VL64/B64 there was room for error as the client would just 'ignore'...