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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:21AM (#749870)

    I miss having the time for IRC.
    And I have seriously considered proposing that we have an IRC channel at work, since it's so much easier than e-mail or gitlab/github issues. I don't know if anyone would take me seriously though...