How Slack brought the group chat to work

Maybe it's a tech company thing but we were using irc for years before slack came about. We eventually swapped to hipchat as it was easier for less technical people to join, and later slack when that shutdown.

Almost every open source project I've worked on coordinated on irc back before slack/discord took over so it's hard to says text based communication tools are anything new. What I will give tools like slack is massively improving ease of use for less technical users, which has meant it's now used much more widely outside technical spheres.

Same here, Slack is one in a long line if similar chat apps we've used over the years, on premises and remote.

That makes sense. What I really like about Slack are the integrations like GitHub and Jira, and commands like `/remind`, and the "Later" tab.

We were using AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) at several previous companies, from late 90's through early 2010's. You could create private chat rooms and invite your coworkers. At other companies, we also used IRC and HipChat.

Let's just pretend Microsoft lync ala Skype didn't exist I guess