Flashback: Internet Relay Chat

Usenet is dead. It withered in the face of competition from web forums, mailing lists and blog comments, and to an extent, BitTorrent. It didn’t help that by the end most of usenet had degenerated into a useless free-for-all where socially inept malcontents trolled and flamed, with little else going on by the end. With little to no moderation, it had become the model for bad behavior on the internet.

I honestly don’t know how much internet chat is going on nowadays, outside of services like Adultfriendfinder and the like, where I’m sure it’s still as popular as ever. Does anyone even use AOL anymore?

The original internet chat, the model for AOL and every other system of chat on the web including instant messaging, was and is IRC, Internet Relay Chat, launched in 1988 and it’s still around 20 years later. The largest IRC network used to be EFNet, it may still be. I see that they average around 60k people connected at any given time. 10 years ago I’m pretty sure the numbers were higher.

IRC is still a useful way to get information.The payoff with IRC versus mailing lists or web forums, is that the response is immediate. Think of it as live customer support for just about anything you can think of, 24/7, provided you know where to go to ask that is.

There are a variety of client programs available for IRC, and all these years later the unix command line programs like BitchX, Epic and Irssi still destroy the rest.

I used to use IRC daily, in fact there was always a client running on at least one of my computers 24/7. IRC is very much like my day job in corrections; long periods of boredom and activity punctuated by moments of panic and response. Well, in the case of IRC there is no adrenalin involved, but it is fun to go back and read what has occurred in an IRC channel periodically during the day. It is definitely not the sort of thing where you sit in front of the computer and give it your rapt attention, unless you’re trying to doze off that is. Back in the days of classic Quake, we all would kill each other online all day, and when we weren’t doing that we’d be chatting on an IRC channel. While IRC is not a social substitute, I actually did get to know a few guys pretty well, and liked them as much as an online-only relationship allowed. In the last 6 years I have used IRC only infrequently when I needed help with some unix or hardware technical issue.

This week I received an email out of the blue from a guy I used to idle on IRC with 10 years ago. It was an invitation to go to a certain channel on an IRC server. I went, and found about 10 of the guys I used to IRC with all those years ago. I don’t know how they found me, but it was fun catching up with them. They are all substantially younger than I am, remember this all started out of our love of Quake. They’ve all grown up nicely and gotten decent jobs, mostly in the IT sector. It also reminded me how much I used to like IRC, and there is an IRC client running on my computer as I type this.

Usenet was replaced by things that did what it offered better. Nothing has come along to replace IRC yet, and 20 years after it’s debut it’s still here.

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