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Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

As someone having an IRC client open while working since around 15 years this is so mindboggling. (Well, everything regarding the buzz about Slack and how it's a replacement for email, no it's the best thing since sliced bread, no wait, it's horrible.. etc.pp)

Why yes, of course you need to restrain yourself from chatting all day. And learn to ignore people or tell them you're not able to talk to them right now - but it can still be immensely helpful to have your network of people available to help you solve your problems - because you're also helping them solve their problems from time to time.

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"I've been doing X for 15 years, and I'm amazed that people who are new to X are finding it difficult"

Is it really so surprising?

same story here, I don't even want to admit how long I've been using IRC. I can imagine that people who are new to using an IRC-like system in an office might lose sight of when it's right to do things in person or over the phone, but once you've got a handle on that, you ought to use the hell out of the chat system, since the more comfortable everybody gets with it, the more they're able to reduce everybody's level of distraction by using IRC judiciously. It also means that on days when you're remote, things feel mostly the same.

IRC is often mentioned in regards to slack, but I find Instant Messenger(s) a bit closer in spirit. Did everyone stop using those too, in favor of facebook and slack, etc?

Same here. We started using Slack because it was the only thing that could break the use of ad hoc AIM and Google Chat accounts.

I do think that the Slack homes for user groups and open source projects (the ones set up with auto-invite on Heroku) are direct replacements for "join us on Freenode" invitations.

which, TBH, a nightmare, because within slack you need to change "group" to be able to be present in multiple projects, or join multiple slack-irc-server...

True, or Skype.

IM in a corporate setting has never really take off IMO. Email is usually the choice, which has a more mature in-house management model.

IM has massive deployments in big corporations. Part of that is that Lync/Skype is kind of a throw-in with Office/Exchange setups these days, but there are millions and millions of seats with IM clients running and being used.

We've got customers that are doing tens and hundreds of thousands of chats per day across their organizations.

I've seen Lync (Skype For Business) gain some traction in more corporate settings.

I remember using an IM client linked to lotus notes (was it sametime?) when I worked in a corporate setting 10 years ago.

Since IRC was available for the last 15 years and only a handful of people used it like you, we should conclude that about the same number would do the same with Slack, all the others are just people who shouldn't be using Slack at all.

IRC dates back to 1989. I myself first compiled a client on a HP-UX 9 system and connected in 1993. IRC was relatively big because it preceded the web; it was one of the few cool, interactive things you could do over the network. That and some early networked games. MUDs, shooters like Hunt (1986), XPilots (1992?)

Even before IRC there was "talk" which let you chat with anyone logged in to the same host (don't recall if it supported network chat). Remember in those days few people had a computer on their desk, instead they had a terminal that connected to a central host.

Yes talk did work over the network. The programmers that wrote it, though, made fundamental mistakes in it. They sent raw C structures over the network without marshaling, oops! So talk didn't work very well. The issues were addresses in "ntalk".

And while talk only allowed for 2 people to communicate, ytalk allowed multiple people to talk at the same time.

Hey, glad you remember ytalk. I was one of the maintainers for a short period of time (I owned metawire.org and worked with Jessica Peterson on it). We depended on ytalk for collaboration to chat and share shells. Those were happier times when the internet was populated by geeks. :)

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