History of IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
daniel.haxx.se
daniel.haxx.se
No, I don't. Mobile phones are immensely more capable than computers 30 years ago, but IRC doesn't handle transient connections well. When your phone goes to sleep the connection drops. Sometimes when you change cell towers the connection drops. Modern users expect a slack-/discord-like "always in the channel" experience, with push notifications, which IRC does not provide.
Modern users expect multi-device sync. If I'm signed into discord or slack on my PC and on my phone, I get push notifications in both places, even if my PC is off.
Leaving my IRC client running, even with irssi-relay or similar, is not a solution.
I like IRC too, but it's become obsolete because it failed to adapt to the expectations of modern users.
> ... doesn't handle transient connections ...
Oh, so it's almost like phone computers can't maintain a connection and have bad networking. Specifically they have problems with TCP because it requires maintaining state and that uses the radio frequently and keeps the computer running which drains their tiny energy storage. But also because phone's UIs are so limited both by screen space and input that only one application really runs at once and background ones are gimped and disconnected.
You are agreeing with me but don't realize it.
I'd love to be equally snide and rude in response but I seem to get a lot of moderator attention so I won't.
A quick search brought up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147321IRC is still used, and some communities have switched to XMPP.
> I was introduced to IRC back in 2002 by a Russian girl called Svetlana (lost contact sadly) a few years my senior at a language school I attended that summer. She introduced me to the channel for the Sub7 trojan horse virus. It was there that I first learnt about IP addresses and ports, and pissing my dad off playing around with his (and others’) PC remotely, printing things like. I remember MoSucker being another trojan horse that was popular on the network.
> We used to share victims and laugh at what we found them doing. I would hang out on other networks on teen channels posing as a girl, sending .scr ‘slideshows’ of my ‘pictures’. Then there were all the warez channels with 0-day releases and the ability to download directly and quickly.
>After quite a few months of script kiddying I was introduced to FreeNode. From there I was introduced to things like Python, FreeBSD, Linux, Emacs, Scheme, SICP, Lisp, Haskell, a free Mathematica subscription, fun mathematics, the idea of going to university abroad, the friend whose house I’m at right now and much more. Obviously there are other sources for this kind of thing these days, but I do look back on that period quite fondly, and cannot imagine where I would be without the people I came across on IRC. I still go back to FreeNode if I ever need some quick help, but I can’t imagine spending my hours hanging out on IRC anymore. Things have changed.
My experience mimics your own. It’s surprising how “closed” computer science was to British teenagers in 2003-2010, computing was reduced to Microsoft Access/Excel and word.
But the skiddy hacker groups were always so willing to teach to those who wanted to listen, which led me to open source, which is similar but a lot less forgiving than I remember the old hacker groups.
I would not be in the same place in life without IRC.
We called it just 'Relay' as I remember it. A much smaller world than IRC today, mostly students with a scattering of university IT workers.