What is so cool about IRC? Reminisce

[danb35]

Any explainer for those of us who don't use IRC?

 

[m0nkey_]

Any explainer for those of us who don't use IRC?

Freenode, where the Free/TrueNAS IRC channel has been hosted for many years is now in total meltdown and no longer represents what Freenode is about. Freenode went through a hostile takeover by somebody called Andrew Lee a couple of weeks ago, channel take overs of projects channels by their "staff", forcing a number of communities to move to either IRC communities Libera.Chat or OFTC. This is reminiscent of IRC drama from the early 90s. This is just the final nail in the coffin as they are wiping clean the services database, which contains all of the registered nicknames and channels.

There's already a #truenas channel on libera.chat if people wish to join.

 

[Tigersharke]

Also, IRC is the original internet chat, long before discord and all the others. It is text and itself not much more, though there have been some additions in the early period for various functions including file transfers, it has remained rather utilitarian and plain, no graphics or sound effects or any other bells and whistles in irc itself, but some clients may go full rococco. I am not sure where I saw another history, including mention of mIRC, I had thought it was regarding ircII itself and went into an irc history lesson, but here is one write-up that tells a fair chunk of it.

History of IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

 

[jgreco]

Also, IRC is the original internet chat,

That is probably not quite correct; IRC was a winner among early Internet chat systems, largely because it supported multiple nodes and scaled better, but there were a number of others such as UKY's forumnet, and BSD's native talk(1) command is a basic form of chat, which appeared with 4.2BSD in 1983, which some of us old-timers still occasionally use, and clearly predates IRC. It's even included as part of FreeNAS.

 

[Tigersharke]

yeah.. talk existed and I had no idea its relation to irc, or ircii. I am under the impression that talk was a person to person rather than a sort of channel or room style group chat. In comparison to discord, gitter, and far too many others which are coated in eye candy and copious features that are well beyond simple chat, irc is still the original or at least the main reason all those others came to be-- the varied devs felt some overwhelming need to create a bikeshed chat program. I like the utilitarian nature of irc, and even if I use Quassel instead of ircII, its not crazy with the excesses. I should have been a little more specific but tired mind and stuff.. so, thats my excuse this time. :P

 

[Constantin]

I marveled “talking” to a random student at Yale in 1988 or so. A 9600 baud modem connected our VAX to the world.

Back then all the newsgroups could be serviced by overnight updates by said modem were not filled with spam and other crud but rather lots and lots of interesting content.

Even the purity test made it to our campus. Lots to aspire to, I suppose.

 

[jgreco]

We'll let you get away with it ... this time.

ytalk was definitely multi-user capable, although a bit hobbled compared to IRC/forumnet/etc.

There were actually a plethora of tools, not all of them "Internet", which allowed multiple users to chat. I still have a copy of Galacticomm's MajorBBS (1986) in the closet here, and maybe TBBS hanging around somewhere too, neither of which got native Internet capabilities until some years later, and of course there were other bulletin board systems, and we had other stuff like a local public school which ran a locally authored "CB emulator" on its mainframe that random people could use if they knew the login. This might have been inspired by TENEX, which had some sort of talk facility as well. The concept of chatting was definitely a hot one, and unfortunately a lot of interesting things that came by at the time never actually became sufficiently popular to have survived.

IRC won a commanding lead on the Internet primarily because it scaled very well, but it had (correction: has) a horribly masochistic configuration and administration syntax. Speaking as someone who ran an IRC node in the late 80's/early 90's, it definitely worked, but it was also a pain to do operations that were not in your daily workflow.

 

[Constantin]

I ran a first class BBS for about a year but then I went abroad and my delinquent classmates running it decided to shut it down.

Thankfully, I tracked down all the folk who had contributed toward its upkeep to refund them their unused membership dues. Dialup at 14400 or 28800, cannot remember. Still have it downstairs, it was hosted on my SE.

once the internet went commercial, the great die-off of BBS’ began. It was too bad since those communities were generally speaking far more self policing re antisocial behavior than we see today. The signal to noise ratio across the internet has only dropped since then.

 

[jgreco]

I marveled “talking” to a random student at Yale in 1988 or so. A 9600 baud modem connected our VAX to the world.

It was lovely being able to connect to the Internet. I still have our first T1-capable sync serial card and CSU/DSU here on display in the office. The idea that 1.544Mbps would not be fast enough someday wasn't even really a thought...

Back then all the newsgroups could be serviced by overnight updates by said modem were not filled with spam and other crud but rather lots and lots of interesting content.

OMG, I am actually bringing up a Usenet transit server in the other window. I suppose at some point I should stop, but since I'm the developer of a Usenet news transit and reader package, it's really hard to let that go. ;-)

 

[Tigersharke]

Things were soo much simpler in the earlier days, before commercialization and everything GUIfied. Pine was a decent email client at school, ircII was very plain, even tintin++ for playing a mud was as text-based as the game itself. Yahoo began simply as a site which cataloged and categorized other internet sites. We had a number of different search engines, none which did much more than index what was out there, when those began they didn't "rate," or censor intentionally. I know the REAL old timers can tell us how bad it was with needing to use punch cards or morris code or something, but I recall wanting to keep a list of the various IP addresses when I visited sites with any of the protocol-specific clients I used. I'm not sure its 100% a good thing that we can talk to a terminal to have a computer somewhere look up the cost of tea in China at that moment.. and then later offer us shopping choices for tea.