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posted by takyon on Tuesday October 16 2018, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the small-talk dept.

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Internet Relay Chat turns 30—and we remember how it changed our lives

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) turned 30 this August.

The venerable text-only chat system was first developed in 1988 by a Finnish computer scientist named Jarkko Oikarinen. Oikarinen couldn't have known at the time just how his creation would affect the lives of people around the world, but it became one of the key early tools that kept Ars Technica running as a virtual workplace—it even lead to love and marriage.

To honor IRC's 30th birthday, we're foregoing the cake and flowers in favor of some memories. Three long-time Ars staffers share some of their earliest IRC interactions, which remind us that the Internet has always been simultaneously wonderful and kind of terrible.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:14PM (#749700)

    My fondest memories of IRC were noob trolling in the vein of Hunter2.

    True story, back in the year 2001 I worked for a major ISP that will remain nameless, and we had a "support tool", which was a fancy application that had a chat backend based on IRC.
    It allowed us to gather all kinds of stats, including a full rundown ala belarc system advisor from the computer. It even allowed us to take over the computer via DCC if we needed to for instance alter some user setting or another that was troublesome. Keep in mind that most people were running Windows 95, Windows 98 etc.

    Long story short, there were so many users of the tool who just wanted to chat and hang out with support because they were lonely, that I took it upon myself to change the MOTD (greeting message).

    The MOTD already included a long list of things to try in order to resolve potential problems, it presented as a normal "click wrap" license so most people ignored it.
    But you had to scroll to the end before pressing the great big "READY" button to join support chat.

    At the bottom of said list right after "press ready to continue" I added...
    "if you need priority support, please press Alt+F4"

    This caused the queue to drop off immediately, but sadly it prompted numerous calls to our direct support number about our support tool "crashing".
    Thankfully that was someone else's problem :D

    The best ISPs still use IRC for support.

    This is something I have never quite understood, because if you're really in need of support then IRC probably isn't working for you either.
    Nevertheless, I recently switched to XMission.com for my Utopia connection, my experience is that they are the best ISP I have ever had. In addition to an excellent web based chat with highly competent techs, they also offer support via IRC. I switched to them after they helped me solve a problem with my line that my own ISP couldn't resolve. (Utopia is a fiber optic system where the govt owns the fiber and you rent "service" from a plethora of different "providers" who provide service over it, which is why XMission could solve my problem despite me not actually being their customer).
    Not to pimp Xmission here, but to show that IRC still has a place. Everyone seems to be moving now to Slack and whatever comes next, but the reality is, what are you going to do when Slack suddenly has an outage or is hacked? Same thing with Facebook and Twitter which have replaced IRC for most individuals now days. At least with IRC the idea that someone else can suddenly decide to shut you down on a whim is minimized, and with e2e encryption now part of many clients, the attack surface is minimized compared to even a few years ago.

    Personally, I'd like to see a renaissance in IRC, or if not IRC then something similarly powerful but decentralized take over.

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