
The History of IRC - pmoriarty
http://www.irc.org/history.html
======
davidw
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verge of being superseded by this, or disrupted by that, or supplanted by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.

~~~
jschwartzi
I learned to touch-type on IRC.

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

------
pasiaj
IRC today is the opposite of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
People who still use IRC are mostly well-mannered, skillful and welcoming of
others, and things only seem to get better day-by-day

People who are unresponsive to email, Tweets and other means of communication
can be very responsive on IRC.

More signal less noise, I quess.

~~~
Havvy
As an IRC OP on a server with mostly non-technical channels, I can guarantee
you that people are not mostly well-mannered. They are welcoming of others
though.

------
hpaavola
When ever I use Skype or Lync (things that I need to use at work), I really
miss IRC. By default modern IM clients are constant source or distraction.
Someone said something? Make sure to ring some bells and blink some
notifications. Someone wrote an emoticon? Of course everyone wants to see
slightly taller than line height image representing the emoticon. With
animations, because why not?

I also really miss how in IRC channels are kinda the default way of
communicating. I feel like Skype and others start from one-to-one
communication and channels/rooms/... are more like a secondary feature.

If at work I need to ask some question, I do not care who answers to that and
in many cases I do not know who has the answer. I do know what team or
interest group might know the answer. With channel first kind of IM (IRC) I
just join #folks-who-develop-the-server-im-sending-data-to and throw the
question in the air. Eventually someone answers me.

With Skype, there is no such channel, because the mindset is different. So I
need to browser the corporate intranet to figure out who might be the tech
lead of the server I'm sending data to and contact that person. I chose the
tech lead because he's the person who most probably knows the answer. Too bad
that he is also the busiest one and I'm just making the situation worse.

Also, I really miss news groups. Why each web forum must reinvent the wheel
and fail at it? :( I'm not that old, only 31. But boy where things better when
I was younger. :D

~~~
sciurus
FWIW, Skype supports the channel-focused communication style you describe.
It's just a matter of company culture on whether there are channels for
everything or you contact people individually. That said, having worked
somewhere that used Skype channels and somewhere that used Slack, I prefer
Slack. The Skype channel experience on mobile is terrible, and the Skype
client on linux is a second-class citizen.

~~~
hpaavola
Pretty much all IM protocols have some channel functionality. It's just that
the user experience in Skype and many other IM's is such, that it does not
ecncourage users to join/create channel first. Rather they all try to get
users to find their friends and chat one on one.

With IRC, all new users are told (by their friens and pretty much all
tutorials) to join a channel first. Also web clients tend to ask user to give
an channel to join before they can do anything. For me and many others IRC is
channels first. Commercial IM systems are one-to-one first.

------
rogerbraun
I wrote a Zork bot[0] for IRC a few days ago, and really started wondering why
the tech community more or less gave up on IRC, especially businesses. Instead
of a free, open source, reliable, distributed multiuser chat we now have the
walled gardens of Facebook, Hipchat and similar services.

It's sad that we can now, essentially, not do much more on the net than we did
20 years ago, but now it has ads and spies on you.

[0]:
[https://github.com/rogerbraun/frotzbot](https://github.com/rogerbraun/frotzbot)

~~~
eddieroger
The audience for the Internet changed. IRC was great when everyone on the 'net
was tech savvy, but look at what happened when people were able to pick
between AOL and direct dial-up connections. Facebook is so simple my
grandmother could figure it out, but even with decent clients like Colloquy, I
wouldn't expect her to find her way around IRC. As for the Enterprise, HipChat
and the like, especially when served via SaaS, offers more than just a chat
server - server management, auditing, easy user setup, integrations to other
tools.

For what it's worth, I agree that it's a shame that we are barely better off
than we were 20 years ago, but I'm willing to accept that if it means widening
the audience of the Internet for everyone. You shouldn't need a CS degree to
surf the world's information.

~~~
pmoriarty
Needing a CS degree to use an IRC client is a bit of a stretch, don't you
think?

~~~
eddieroger
Today, it's probably somewhat of a stretch. Twenty years ago, no, I don't
think so.

~~~
caf
I can assure you that 20 years ago there were plenty of teenagers who hadn't
even finished high school that were on IRC, not to mention large numbers of
students in non-CS degrees.

------
kolinko
For people who'd like to revisit IRC, I highly recommend irccloud.com (I'm
unaffiliated with them).

They offer a web client, which also stores channel history when you're away.
And there's also an iOS client that will send you push notifications when
someone mentions your name...

~~~
aluhut
I've a ZNC bouncer running on a PI. It's cheaper ;)

~~~
voltagex_
What does a bouncer give you over running weechat in tmux, or weechat and a
relay?

~~~
ggreer
I run ZNC on a $5/month cloud server. It lets me use fancy GUI clients like
Textual 5.[1] ZNC replays everything that happened while my laptop or phone
was sleeping. Also, I can connect multiple clients simultaneously. Lastly,
znc-push[2], alerts my phone when people mention or PM me.

I'm not a big fan of terminal-based IRC clients. Most text on IRC is prose
made by humans, meant to be read by humans. Terminals use fixed-width fonts.
That's handy for structured stuff, but for prose is less information-dense and
less readable.

1\. [http://www.codeux.com/textual/](http://www.codeux.com/textual/)

2\. [https://github.com/jreese/znc-push](https://github.com/jreese/znc-push)

~~~
VonGuard
That's exactly how much IRCcloud costs: $5 per month, and it allows you to
bring it up on any Web browser, even a Chromebook. And it just works.

~~~
kuschku
Or you can just use quassel, which has clients for android, iOS, windows, Mac
Linux and the web, works exactly like IRCCloud, is fully open source, and is
able to run on a 2$/month webserver.

------
kazinator
A few years ago I fired up IRC for old times sake. I ended up kicked off #unix
on EFnet at some point.

My transgression? I claimed that I used IRC in 1993. Which was impossible
since, I was informed, IRC had only been around since 2000-something. :)

~~~
wyager
I was on #apple on freenode a while back asking for help with a strange HDD
driver failure I was getting on my macbook after installing Linux on a
secondary disk.

A channel mod informed me that, because Linux didn't use Apple's proprietary
advanced power management protocols (which don't exist, by the way), Linux
would overheat and utterly destroy my CPU.

After insisting that this was not my issue, and that what he was saying was
ridiculous, he permabanned me. I looked him up online, thinking this was
surely a joke, and it turns out this guy is a well-known weirdo with a
pathological fear of open source software. It was very strange, and I have no
idea how such a person got a mod position in a tech channel.

~~~
grimman
Since we're swapping stories of weird bans... I got banned for saying
Battlefield != Call of Duty. I have no stake in the matter; I don't play
either game. But apparently this was enough to warrant a permanent ban!

------
vinkelhake
I think that IRC is a great medium. I first came in contact with it in 1993
and I've been using it ever since. These days I use it for two things: keeping
contact with friends (I'm an expat) and helping people out in programming
channels.

As others have noted, I think IRC is one of those things that will just keep
chugging on, unaffected by trends.

It's been great for getting to know people all over the world. Relationships
started on IRC have, among other things, given me my wife and my current job.

------
sirn
If someone interest in recent development of IRC protocol, you might be
interest in the IRCv3 Working Group[1] where they're working toward improving
the current IRC protocol (and already being used in number of networks and
clients).

[1]: [http://ircv3.atheme.org/](http://ircv3.atheme.org/)

~~~
aw3c2
Does it require encrypted connections?

~~~
voltagex_
You may be able to help influence it at
[https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues](https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues)

------
georgemcbay
Pretty limited history, but some nostalgia value there.

I haven't used IRC in many years, but started using bitnet relay back when I
was about 15 or 16 and then moved on to irc (mostly +Amiga!/#Amiga!,
+hack/#hack, used it back when all the channel numbers were just integers as
well on various channels) soon after Jarkko had it up.

I remember when having 50 people logged into the whole of irc (long before all
the splits into EFNet and then all the others) was a really busy night.

Ended up meeting a lot of cool people through irc and pissing off a bunch more
as I was a bit of a troll back then (well, _more_ of a troll than I am now),
pretty stereotypical geek kid with more intelligence than wisdom.

------
baldfat
Last Update 2005.

I miss the 1990s with IRC them days were unreal and so much fun. Today I think
of it as a tool to get help and to help others and that is about it. Seems
like channels get smaller every year except a few (Arch Linux and Ubuntu.

~~~
pmoriarty
IRC has a lot of life still left in it.

Here's a small sample from the FreeNode IRC network, from right now:

    
    
      |-------+------------|
      | Users | Channel    |
      |-------+------------|
      |  1751 | #ubuntu    |
      |  1620 | #debian    |
      |  1590 | #archlinux |
      |  1488 | #haskell   |
      |  1477 | #python    |
      |  1109 | #gentoo    |
      |   987 | #vim       |
      |   877 | #ruby      |
      |   815 | #emacs     |
      |   652 | #perl      |
      |   452 | #java      |
      |   417 | #lisp      |
      |   275 | #startups  | [1]
      |   190 | #scheme    |
      |-------+------------|
    

And that's just one (admittedly popular) IRC network. There are 6 networks
with over 10,000 users, and hundreds of smaller networks.[2]

[1] - #startups - the HN channel!

[2] - [http://searchirc.com/networks](http://searchirc.com/networks)

~~~
pasiaj
There's also the somewhat active #hackernews channel.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/l95pvm6v7xtnyy1/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/l95pvm6v7xtnyy1/Screen%20Shot%202014-11-30%20at%2022.25.55.png?dl=0)

~~~
veb
I'm not sure why you gave us a screenshot, rather than just typing out the
network, and how many users it has on the channel. Feels like it'd be a lot
less work! :)

~~~
pasiaj
Number of people on channel is in no way a good indicator of activity. There
are very active channels with 2-4 people and totally unactive channels with
even hundreds of people.

~~~
baldfat
Yeah the number of people LOGGED in is totally different then active. I am
always "logged" in just so I get to keep the cache of the dialogues. If one
channel has 100 people you might be there all alone.

------
avar
Isn't one of the main advantages of IRC that it's still a true federated
protocol? I.e. you can host a channel #foobar across 10 servers and that
channel will always survive netsplits (albeit with some number of clients
splitting off), whereas with Jabber some server will always have to be the
sole host of that channel?

------
brianstorms
For the record, on PLATO there was TERM-talk (live character-by-character,
typed, instant messaging between two users) and Talkomatic (multi-channel
group live character-by-character typed chat rooms) both released in 1973. And
there was monitor mode (while in a TERM-talk you could invoke screen sharing
so the other person could see what was on your screen, and both of you
continue talking).

------
jrnichols
I'm one of the people that still uses IRC frequently. The biggest problem that
I saw over the years was just the rise of other platforms and fewer new users
taking the place of the old school users that were moving elsewhere.

The ban evading trolls and constant net splits caused by frequent DDoS attacks
were a problem. ISPs stopped hosting IRC servers because as soon as a server
would come up, it would be a huge DDoS target. Then the overbearing fear of
"illegal material" flowing across the pipes was a problem for others.

But I'm glad that it's still around. One channel in particular I live in has
been around for 15+ years now. It's like a digital version of Cheers, without
avatars.

------
Meekro
Sad to see how much IRC has declined recently. I spent much of my youth on
DALnet, and that's what forced me to learn about computers. There was lots of
hacking, exploits, social engineering, you name it. Combine that with how IRC
standardly revealed everyone's IP, and it made for quite the environment. If
you were going to run major channels back then, it was either learn to protect
yourself, or get pwn3d. I had no choice but to do the former, and I'm still
working with computers today.

~~~
rhizome
Contrary to your gauge of IRC being in decline is that it isn't like DALnet of
the 90s/early 2000s, I see that as a good thing. "Quite the environment" is
quite the euphemism.

~~~
hluska
IRC was the first time that I ever turned my computer off in shock. "Quite the
environment" is quite the euphemism!

------
cdcarter
One of my favorite subcultures online is the high school and collegiate
quizbowl (or academic competition) circuit. They now operate three regular IRC
channels where the majority of online discussion occurs, where internet
matches are played, where the various support agencies and companies have
their regular meetings, and more.

Such a national activity has to have good communication tools, and IRC can't
be beat.

------
feld
I've seen ZNC mentioned several times, but if you want a good bouncer that is
very lightweight check out Bip

[https://bip.milkypond.org/](https://bip.milkypond.org/)

------
caf
Also of historical interest is the Efnet Oper Guide:

[http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircd/ircopguide.html](http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircd/ircopguide.html)

------
rayalez
By the way, here's an interesting project, people are working on a 'modern'
alternative to IRC: [http://chapp.is/](http://chapp.is/)

------
erkose
The extent of my recent experience with irc: A bunch of people joined. A bunch
of people left. Nobody chatted.

~~~
pgeorgi
Depends on the channel, the day of week and time of day (and the time zone its
main constituency resides in) and how long you waited.

There are a few channels I know that are mostly active over the workweek in US
pacific time. Others that wake up with the EU, with some extra activity on
weekends.

But yes, some channels really are slow and mostly wake up only on specific
actions (eg. joining, asking for a question, people answer, everybody gets
back to doing their work) - essentially support channels.

~~~
wldcordeiro
Some are that way by design. #python on Freenode is really aimed at being a
support channel. Off-topic conversation is practically not allowed (they have
a bot that will pm you if you type lol telling you that #python is a no lol
zone.)

