The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old!
I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great:
1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting
2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy
3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO especially in younger people
Whereas on Discord, I can leave messages for people, have a channel where I post funny stuff throughout the day, share music and videos. I can have multiple threaded conversations, have multiple servers each with many channels, etc.
All of this was technically achievable with irc and advanced enough client/plugins, but it surely wasn't accessible to everyone, and definitely not free.
Most organized gaming groups used mumble/ts/vent and some combination of IRC and forums. The only difference here is that they're physically in the same app, and of course, there's embedded stuff which is just generally technical iteration (some IRC clients had it). Otherwise IRC always had channels and DMs and mentions and multiple servers. Only setting up your own server wasn't free -- you could easily hop on any network and create as many private channels for you and your friends as you wanted. Yes, older technology wasn't as accessible but at the core it's the same feature set.
[citation needed]
I know very few people who leave their computer on 24/7. I agree forums is actually probably closer to replicating what Discord has, those were definitely a big part of pre-discord communities.
And yes, my main point was that it has become a lot more accessible and free, leading it to blow up.
Or... Someone getting totally owned in Doom cracking it and disconnecting a terminator.
Great times.
I spent $400 in hard-earned teenage income on a USR refurb and never felt buyer's remorse.
When more people got PCs we would just carry our computers around the block. CRTs were not light, the advent of the lighter weight LCD was more pragmatic to us than to most I suspect!
Our "high speed" terminal was a 300 baud (30 CPS) CRT.
These 3 terminals were shared by about 15 kids per class.
I think the first big one for voice chat in my friendship circle was "XFire" but when we started having bigger groups it didn't cut it anymore and we all moved to vent!