When Bennie started the irc channel of #Furry, he was using a university account on a VAX machine. Due to a poor client (IRCDough) and a lack of account space, Bennie was forced to write custom scripts and zip them to save space in his account. When he logged in, they were unzipped to a scratch space.

Here is a capture of the IRC zip file's information from it's last revision:

Directory USR3:[STU.PEPOLLAR.TEXTS] IRC.ZIP;1 24 26-APR-1995 12:00:44.82 Total of 1 file, 24 blocks.

Note the date. This file was last archived on April 26, 1995. One of it's file is listed below:

Directory LIB2:[SCRATCH.STOKOWSKI] IRCRC.TXT;1 52 5-FEB-1995 16:56:04.00 Total of 1 file, 52 blocks.

This was the custom script for Bennie's IRCDough client. It was last edited as of February 5, 1995. When Bennie was regularly using this script, it was often edited. Just the last revision was this early. Here is a section from that file:

join #LionKing join #UnderCouch join #Furry alias CHANNEL { topic #LionKing Hakuna Matata topic #UnderCouch Hey! Dust kitties!!! join #Lions topic #Lions In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle.... join #Tigers topic #Tigers ROOOOAAARRRRRRRR!!!!!! join #CatHouse topic #CatHouse And the Cat came back.... join #Furry topic #Furry All Beasts Great And Small.... join #BigKitty topic #BigKitty 6 foot at the shoulder, 3000 lbs, still growing.... join #CafeDisney topic #CafeDisney Try the Cafe Latte. join #ElfQuest}

And there you go. At last revision I was automatically joining three channels. (#LionKing, #UnderCouch, and #Furry). I can put a confirmed date that IRC Furry goes back to at least 1995. Most likely a year earlier than that.