His timeline sounds exactly right to me, I basically did the same thing.

Mid-late 90s I used Beej's network programming guide to write an IRC client.

However, by late 90s you weren't paying for a C compiler, you had Cygwin, MinGW, or DJGPP (OK, probably no sockets in that case).

Screenshot of GCC 10.2 compiling its own source code Original author(s) Richard Stallman Developer(s) GNU Project Initial release March 22, 1987; 36 years ago