Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of cool that IRC actually pre-dates the web. It's always on the verge of being superseded by this, or disrupted by that, or supplanted by something else, but it never really happens, and IRC continues to chug along, doing what it does best, independent of any one company or hot new technology. It may not always be the most beautiful thing out there, but it is rugged.

IRC was one of the first things that got me excited about the Internet - I was studying Italian at the university, and realized that I could actually communicate, in real time with people on the other side of the planet, for free, back in 1993. I was utterly amazed by this. At first, I figured the people in the chat room (#italia) were BS'ing me and must just be Italians that lived in the US or something. A few years later, I managed to meet several of them in person when I moved to Italy for the first time.

Today, among others, I hang out on #startups on Freenode. It's not a very "serious" channel like some of the programming language ones are, but it's fun and interesting sometimes.

It also does its job behind the scenes. In Spain there are a couple of websites that have rather popular chat rooms where people go to meet people from their region, find dates, etc. Most of them don't know that they're connecting to an IRC network, and that they may even be talking to someone that uses a standalone client :)

IRC is probably the best example of worse-is-better design, its not great, has some obvious problems, but its good enough that nothing to come after it has been able to fully unseat it.

We have a BIG PUSH to go all Google Hangouts. Which is admittedly a vast improvement on nothing, but ... The technology department has resisted on the basis that every tool talks to IRC, and no tool talks to Hangouts.

Hangouts continues to build itself an Island as it sheds any even hand-wavy notion of being XMPP.

Slack has a lovely web client and both XMPP and IRC gateways -- meaning most everyone can use their favorite interface.

Rugged, that's a good word. I've seen IRC set as default communication channel for incident management. No matter how much infrastructure is down, as long as you have a few engineers, they can either reach or set up an ircd in no time and have proper, timestamped and logged communication.

I learned to touch-type on IRC.

Typing in complete, correctly-punctuated sentences on IRC brought my speed from 55wpm to 90wpm.

I learned to touch-type playing Quake. So I can type in very short, curse-infused sentences before getting back to fighting.

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