I remember logging in to IRC from the University of Oregon where I was taking an Italian class. I saw there was an #italy channel and it was full of people who were actually in Italy, which I found kind of mind boggling. This was 1993, when 'long distance calls' were still a thing, and I was talking directly with people on the other side of the world for free.
Speaking of source code from 1998, the first IRC client I used was mIRC because it was installed in my Uni's CIP pool. First released in 1995 it is still alive and gets regular updates.
There is a Slack alternative with image / video embeds/uploads based on and fully compatible with IRC – IRCCloud, which is founded and built by early Last.FM team. – https://www.irccloud.com
I worked on the client for a couple of months back in 2015, added a quick "channel switcher" – it was a fun project where I learned about fuzzy matching and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_metric and looked at how most editors did their "Search project files" commands.
I sometimes tried to irc for 24 hours straight, but always fell asleep. I was following #sci.nanotech and always testing how long can I go spewing nonsense before real experts, like David Deutsch, realize I am full of shit. Though I did discover a minor issue in Diamond Age Book because of this faux expertise.
Honestly it's a shame that IRC is only a thing for tech circles and that IRCv3 never took off (at least currently, libera.chat still doesn't have the /history command).
I remember one of the first random people I interacted with on IRC who was also at a university lab pirating software getting so mad at me that I didn't tell them they could download many things simultaneously from IRC bots and I had only recently found out myself that afternoon.
My roommate in the 90s was big into IRC in the mid to late 90s. The number of girls he hooked up with from IRC over that time was jaw dropping. It was the first way people from around the country or the world could reliable chat with each other and it was hugely successful.
You can see how mIRC looked and use it on my site https://pieter.com on a working IRC server with a working dial up connection with Winsock and a real ISP made by @bai0
mIRC scripting is what got me into programming. The summer I found it as a kid I was immediately hooked, being able to write code that actually interacted with the world and did something blew my mind. I was so into the 'war channels' where everyone would kick each other and optimization was key.
It is hard to overstate how influential IRC have been in my life. I met my best friend on IRC in 1999. He found his wife on IRC a few years later.
We followed the towers collapse on 9/11 over IRC in a blizzard of all-caps screams and links to TV screenshots and RealVideo clips. It was hours before the government of my country had lifted the embargo on the media to report it. I called my friends and family and everyone was just incredulous, it sounded like a dumb thriller plot.
I got a job offer and moved countries via IRC, then again a few years later. We watched people join, age and disappear. One of the channels I am still on is full of VPS hosted ghosts; its topic had been set by a man who had passed away.
I think it was Efnet #warez channel that pointed me towards the right places to learn some software in high school, and that wound up getting me so far ahead working with CAD that it undoubtedly was the reason I got a full ride scholarship to an engineering university that I never would have be able to afford tuition to otherwise.
A random guy on another channel heard about how I was struggling to run certain things because my family couldn't afford anything newer than an old 486 with 8MB of RAM, on a motherboard that didn't support any modern graphics cards and at that point was barely able to run Windows. This person, whom I didn't know other than just a screen name and chatting about Paintball, just straight up sent me an entire motherboard, RAM, and CPU combo in the mail; A relatively new at the time AMD Athlon, on a motherboard with an AGP slot, so I could finally get a modern 3D graphics accelerator. Nothing asked in return, just 'here ya go kid, make good use of it'.
These two events when put together essentially changed the course of my life more than almost anything else, and both happened on IRC.
Wow, that must have blown your hair back quite a bit! Thanks for sharing the story. I had a similar upgrade path and that was such a huge leap forward.
Oh, the good old days!. First IRC and then yahoo chat (asl?). Though I doubt if there were millions of users for IRC in the 80's, as the youtuber claims. I thought, maybe thousands.
Got my first job through IRC. Still using it (with weechat as my bouncer and weechat-android), though I see a lot of [m] suffixes these days on other users.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 52.4 ms ] threadI met a lot of cool people on IRC like antirez, and interacted with some random ones like the woman who is now the prime minister of Italy ( https://web.archive.org/web/20020105230808/http://www.geocit... )
https://www.mirc.com/
I worked on the client for a couple of months back in 2015, added a quick "channel switcher" – it was a fun project where I learned about fuzzy matching and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_metric and looked at how most editors did their "Search project files" commands.
(were you on #gb back in the day?)
Also has Hacker News in Gopher!
We followed the towers collapse on 9/11 over IRC in a blizzard of all-caps screams and links to TV screenshots and RealVideo clips. It was hours before the government of my country had lifted the embargo on the media to report it. I called my friends and family and everyone was just incredulous, it sounded like a dumb thriller plot.
I got a job offer and moved countries via IRC, then again a few years later. We watched people join, age and disappear. One of the channels I am still on is full of VPS hosted ghosts; its topic had been set by a man who had passed away.
We're old and dying. :(
It was trivial to BSOD a remote Windows box, and Linux made you immune to that!
A random guy on another channel heard about how I was struggling to run certain things because my family couldn't afford anything newer than an old 486 with 8MB of RAM, on a motherboard that didn't support any modern graphics cards and at that point was barely able to run Windows. This person, whom I didn't know other than just a screen name and chatting about Paintball, just straight up sent me an entire motherboard, RAM, and CPU combo in the mail; A relatively new at the time AMD Athlon, on a motherboard with an AGP slot, so I could finally get a modern 3D graphics accelerator. Nothing asked in return, just 'here ya go kid, make good use of it'.
These two events when put together essentially changed the course of my life more than almost anything else, and both happened on IRC.
Idling on irc in some xdcc warez channel - waiting 24 hours or sth for some download to complete.. those were the days
Cheers IRC! I'm still connected to this day, albeit Liberachat, not Undernet.