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Internet Relay Chat Turns 30—and We Remember How It Changed Our Lives

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

upstart writes:

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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:58PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:58PM (#749709)

    ...the more they stay the same.

    We had IRC, and IRC was good, and it worked. And IRC continues to be good and continues to work.
    But now we are forced to use Slack because it's 'app' looks better...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @01:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @01:08AM (#749740)

    Fun fact: For most of its history, Slack used IRC as the backend protocol. They slowly extended it more and more with kludges for different features. They didn't fully transition from it in a way that broke backward compatibility until 2017.

  • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday October 17 2018, @10:12AM (1 child)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Wednesday October 17 2018, @10:12AM (#749889)

    Ugh, don't remind me. At a company I used to work for, they decided to get rid of IRC and replace it with Slack, despite my protections, because "it looked better", and you could send embedded images in it.

    However rather than be able to use any IRC client I wanted (with whatever interface I liked), and being able two write scripts and bots to interface with it, I ended up shoved into Slacks horrible, limited web interface. Sure, it has some kind of horrible kludgy web-hook type API, but I always had to have a browser running with it, which I hated having to do.

    I still prefer IRC, Slack is a bloated, pale facsimile , and less reliable to boot. Just another in a long line of backwards steps that have been happening lately in technology.

    • (Score: 1) by gozar on Wednesday October 17 2018, @05:19PM

      by gozar (5426) on Wednesday October 17 2018, @05:19PM (#750038)

      However rather than be able to use any IRC client I wanted (with whatever interface I liked), and being able two write scripts and bots to interface with it, I ended up shoved into Slacks horrible, limited web interface. Sure, it has some kind of horrible kludgy web-hook type API, but I always had to have a browser running with it, which I hated having to do. I still prefer IRC, Slack is a bloated, pale facsimile , and less reliable to boot. Just another in a long line of backwards steps that have been happening lately in technology.

      Check out Wee-slack, a script for Weechat. It works better than the Slack IRC bridge ever did.