Happy 30th Birthday IRC
August 24, 2018 12:41 AM   Subscribe

 
Heh. My best friend in the world and I met in IRC over 20 years ago. We have yet to meet in the flesh, but there is hope.
posted by Samizdata at 1:41 AM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]


(For those, like me, who are from a different country and geographically challenged, Oulu is in Finland.)
posted by eviemath at 2:58 AM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


/trout Samizdata
posted by persona at 2:59 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


Just like the underlying TCP/IP protocols it's built on top of, IRC is a half-assed under-designed piece of crap that demonstrates the truth of the worse is better principle beyond all reasonable doubt.

Happy birthday, you thing from another world you.
posted by flabdablet at 3:35 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]


I loved IRC! Thanks for this post. I was surprised to learn you can use it on a smartphone!
posted by eirias at 4:01 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


IRC was our chat system at my last job so I was on it all day. My current job uses Slack and it seems pretty obvious that Slack was heavily influenced by IRC.
posted by octothorpe at 4:31 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Were it not for IRC, my life would have been dramatically different. Rarely can one point at a single technology that changed a person's life in such a dramatic way.
posted by wierdo at 5:10 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]


Another tally here for the "oldest & bestest friend via IRC" (#animeMP3s on dalnet) and "dramatic life influence" columns.
posted by curious nu at 5:22 AM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


I just want to know if #drugs on efnet still has the same password. Not enough to install irc again, mind you.
posted by h00py at 5:28 AM on August 24, 2018


I met Mrs. Example met through Denver Freenet (RIP), a BBS which included IRC. It's pretty much a given that if it weren't for IRC, my life would be very different today.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


I tried IRC once, it didn't take.
posted by Fizz at 5:50 AM on August 24, 2018


I was on IRC from far too young an age (~12), having conversations and sharing files I definitely should not have been. It was a weird time. It gave me a chance to put on personas and try to figure out who I was, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. I think the net effect was positive, but good lord some of the shit I got up to was not right.

One long-term benefit was it pushed me more towards CS (which I had an interest in already). In the mid-'90s I did so much mIRC scripting; I had a whole set of scripts I packaged and distributed to veritable dozens of users! I even wrote a shared whiteboard capability inside of it when it gained image writing abilities, years before I ever saw a commercial version of such a thing. IRC was also where I learned tons about MUDs (I taught myself C, having prior experience with Pascal/BASIC/QBasic, just so I could mod CircleMUD).

I was still using IRC up until a couple years ago (private server), when finally we moved to Slack for my long-term friends' communication channel. Probably for the best, but sometimes I miss it ...
posted by tocts at 5:51 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]


I have a chat window right now on an IRC server with Blinkenshell, one of several retrogrouch sites I've found for those of us who miss the VT100 days.
posted by MrGuilt at 6:25 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


I use IRC every day and have met some wonderful people there. <3
posted by Stewriffic at 6:50 AM on August 24, 2018


I've never used IRC but like the idea of getting to know people from all different background all over the country. Is it something someone could get into today? Does it still have a decent userbase?
posted by holmesian at 6:55 AM on August 24, 2018


Oh wow. I remember figuring out IRC chatrooms when I was in high school, and promptly making a beeline for #foreverknight. I...think my taste has improved since then?

Mostly I cannot believe the innocuous experience I had -- just shootin' the shit about a terrible vampire show. No spam, no one being an asshole, just chatting with people. I was a lightly immature teenager in several ways, and IRC (and the early internet as a whole) managed to shepherd me through actually connecting with other human beings, and being a bit more grown up in ways that....I guess are technically still possible?

Anyway, happy birthday IRC, and thanks for the memories.
posted by kalimac at 7:02 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


Not to be confused with International Reply Coupons, part of the original Ponzi scheme. A little more recently, they've been used for amateur radio operators in different countries to exchange QSL cards, though that seems less common lately and the US Post Office apparently no longer sells them.
posted by exogenous at 7:20 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


How much better is modern group chat than IRC, really? I wish I could have IRC channels with friends (on mobile, too!) instead of gchat/SMS/signal/etc. GIFs and stickers are cool though.

Anyone still on it, what are your favorite communities?

gimme op!
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 7:21 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


There is a good friendly and helpful amateur radio chat at irc.geekshed.net #redditnet

Also, there is an IRC web interface at kiwiirc.com
posted by exogenous at 7:28 AM on August 24, 2018


I wish I could have IRC channels with friends (on mobile, too!) instead of gchat/SMS/signal/etc.

I mean, you're literally describing what Slack is. Slack can reasonably be described as: what if IRC was modern, had web and phone interfaces on all platforms, and supported images and threading. (Also: proprietary).

You can make a Slack for friends, it's free (though you only get searchable history for a set number of messages back without paying money per user).
posted by tocts at 7:31 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


When my company shut down and we were all scattered to the winds, we set up an IRC server and have been meeting there ever since.

It's going on nearly 20 years now.

We also wrote and played with bots to capture links and tweet them, auto respond to queries (stock prices, weather, last time someone was around), save scrollback on a web page, etc. We could have been Slack before Slack I guess. But oh well. At least I can fire up a terminal and find my friends whenever I want.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:44 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


---netsplit---
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:59 AM on August 24, 2018 [10 favorites]


obligatory xkcd

Now, I'm not saying that I'm that guy, but I'm also not not saying it either...
posted by namewithoutwords at 8:00 AM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]


Up until we finally moved to Slack, I routinely had "time online" in IRC measured in months (a few times measured in years), due to screen + irssi on the same machine the server ran on. This is a dumb thing to be proud about but life is dumb and so am I.
posted by tocts at 8:02 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


IRC was my first introduction to a lot of things, and I, too, was on it as a super young kid. I spent most of my time downloading anime and music, talking to people all over the world, scripting (which is something I should have kept at, now that I look back on it), learning about things way before I was “suppose” to know about them. curious nu mentioned #animeMP3s on DALnet upthread, a channel I definitely was going in and out of at various times, which makes me wonder how many people here I ran into when I was probably in 4th grade and onward 🤔

One funny thing about IRC that I remember from when I was much younger was how Westwood Studios’ online program for Command & Conquer multiplayer was built on top of it, so you’d be in chat rooms finding people to start a game with but the program didn’t work like mIRC and such, so you weren’t able to do certain things like make the channel topic styled or op people and such. Fun times. When I was a kid (and still to this day as a 29-year-old) I had a weird fascination with certain words and the way they sounded when you say them. My Westwood Online nick was “kinky” and some numbers. I didn’t understand what the actual word meant, but I was also too busy being a raging asshole to people for it to get me weird attention. I’m pretty sure my DALnet nick was chiisai_chrono or chibi_chrono.

The internet was such a strange place back then, and it’s very weird to have so many memories of being a kid that took place in literal cyberspace. I’m not sure if people these days even think about it since it’s so ubiquitous, but it really feels like a different world when I think about it now.
posted by gucci mane at 8:02 AM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


Oh wow. I remember figuring out IRC chatrooms when I was in high school, and promptly making a beeline for #foreverknight. I...think my taste has improved since then?

Nothing wrong with "Forever Night"--my wife was big into it back in the day (early Nineties, when we were just getting out of college).

Well, nothing wrong until it moved to USA Network, and they brought in younger, sexier, cheaper cast members, as they are want to do (see also: "Airwolf").
posted by MrGuilt at 8:07 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Namewithoutworlds: I think this is the more apt XKCD.
posted by MrGuilt at 8:11 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]


I dunno, it seems to be missing "long-term asynchronous communication via strategic finger / .plan abuse".
posted by tocts at 8:18 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]


Man I miss the wild west days of IRC. Slack isn't the same.
posted by ejoey at 8:53 AM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


My entire teenage social life consisted of the Cowboy Bebop message board IRC channel. This was somehow both way lamer and way cooler than it sounds. I joined the channel back in 2001, when I was 13: while it could have gone horrendously, Catch-A-Predator wrong, it was actually a great experience - I chalk it up to some unknowable combination of dumb luck and the sort of people who are extremely into analyzing Cowboy Bebop. Thanks to that IRC channel and the message board itself, was able to have healthy, safe interactions with very cool, artsy adults, as well as other nerds my age.

I met some of them in real life, and I still interact with others to this day. Many of us have gone on to very successful careers and happy personal lives, which you might not have predicted from how we started - you know, as socially inept IRC dorks talking about an already-kinda old jazz-themed cartoon. Bebop fans at that time also tended to have absolutely phenomenal taste in music and literature, which exposed me to some stuff I would never have encountered without that very particular community.

to summarize: 10/10, can recommend IRC, trout-slap something something
posted by faineg at 8:55 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


IRC is one of those strange constants in my life-- I met some great friends on there in the early days, playing CTF and eventually Team Fortress starting way back in the Compuserve dial-up days.

We still hang out in the same clan channel, even though we're now largely scattered across the globe and even though we rarely play games with each other due to just life, lag and time-zone mismatches. The IRC channel is this happy constant that just has ended up being the closest thing to a 'local pub' that I've ever really had-- whatever time or day you ssh into your irc shell, you catch up on the back-buffer, and just continue this slow conversation.

Happy birthday IRC :)
posted by Static Vagabond at 9:18 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Happy birthday, IRC. It was an early hangout for me, there was used content and foolishness. Scary Devil Monastery, rec.folk-dancing and others. It was and may still be a place to look for weird interesting people and stuff
posted by theora55 at 9:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


IRC is the thing your wicked smart cousin whips up over a long weekend with their college buddies, so they can impress their friends.

Slack is what you get when they graduate with an MBA and start thinking about growth strategy.
posted by muchomas at 10:41 AM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


Was musing on just how many different flavours of comm channels Finnish engineers from Oulu have come up with in their spare time.
posted by infini at 11:10 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


oh the halcyon days:
ftp.oulu.fi
sunet.se
monash.au.edu (?)
funet,fi,
ac.oak.oakland.edu (?)
and of course:
ftp.spies.com / wiretap.spies.com

What else am i missing?
posted by symbioid at 11:17 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sorry, wrong thread protocol.
posted by symbioid at 11:28 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


That would be monash.edu.au, not monash.au.edu.
posted by flabdablet at 12:17 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Started using IRC before they introduced #channels, when they were either public +channels or secret -channels & you could only be on one at a time. I'm thinking 91 or 92. I was on the wildest of the wild, wild west, +hack then #hack. It was the proving ground for my career & life-long obsession in infosec.
posted by scalefree at 1:00 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Nothing wrong with "Forever Night"--my wife was big into it back in the day (early Nineties, when we were just getting out of college).

Hey, cool! I was a bit after that (I'm pretty sure I was in high school, so after '96), but it's not impossible that I chatted with your wife at some point, 20 years ago!
posted by kalimac at 2:39 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


*sigh* but what I really miss is telnet.
posted by ovenmitt at 5:55 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


telnet hasn't gone anywhere. Although at this point it's pretty much for protocol debugging.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:30 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


I always enjoy reading about everyone's experiences with IRC and telnet but, wow, I guess I missed out? Was I only the only one who used these systems, fairly extensively, but never made friends with folks?

Maybe my stranger-danger programming had already been installed?
posted by jojo and the benjamins at 8:09 PM on August 24, 2018


Maybe my stranger-danger programming had already been installed?

Maybe. IRC connections were always more distant and contextual than BBS friends (who were usually local, because long distance was expensive). Those kinds of mediated relationships around a particular self-selected interest, vs. general social proximity were novel then but are perfectly commonplace now. (MeFi's BBS-ness, contrasted with sites or communities centered on some specific shared interest or project, is one the things I really treasure about it.)

I definitely had both some beneficial friendships and some problematic interactions on IRC as a preteen and teen. But just a year or two later than I got into it and you're much more likely to have had those experiences in AOL chat or after that, webchat.

For today's kids it's presumably FB, insta and snap. Tumblr still, for some. And probably other platforms I'm not fully aware of.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:03 PM on August 24, 2018


*fistbump to the folks on the FK channels in the 90s*
posted by current resident at 9:31 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


> persona:
"/trout Samizdata"

/k-line Persona
posted by Samizdata at 9:54 AM on August 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was involved in moderating a left-leaning political channel during the Obama years. Usually between 100-150 users. I live in Australia, so I'd take the night shift. Otherwise the trolls would come in while the US mods were asleep and just flood the channel with crap.

I could have told you how twitter would work out from day zero. One of the reasons I never joined. IRC, open to the public and without moderation, quickly turns to hell. Sometimes I feel like a veteran of a war, nodding in grim recognition at the shocked look of the new recruits coming off the battlefield of twitter. I've seen it before, I've seen the very worst of it. I have seen trolls, and I know them.

I stopped the day Obama won his second term. I don't know if you can understand the barrage of unfiltered super intense hatred Obama inspired on irc. You had to be doing what I was doing, and we were a huge target.

It's funny, now I know more about US civics and politics than most Americans. I know that trolls are to be expected wherever they have an opportunity. I know that's nothing new. People think it is, but it's not.

I put up a fight, I'm proud that I did. Then I got into this bizarre half finished indie game no-one had ever heard of called Minecraft, and my life improved immensely.

I have so much respect for the moderators of Metafilter.
posted by adept256 at 11:58 AM on August 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


btw, do any Aussies remember when telstra ran an efnet server? because they did.
posted by adept256 at 12:23 PM on August 26, 2018


/k-line Persona

And everyone who sees that you ended up just banning a specific nick laughs their ass off when Persona comes back as Persona_ and continues annoying the shit out of you.

I much preferred /<redacted> which would kindly disconnect the target from their server with some spoofed RST packets. No need for one's own O line ;)
posted by wierdo at 7:41 PM on August 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Remember that IRC is Internet Relay Chat. Because Relay already existed, on Bitnet. IRC was the migration.

Not that I go back to Relay, oh, heavens no. (/Rumsfeld)
posted by aurelian at 10:54 PM on August 26, 2018


There will always be a place in my heart for IRC, I spent a lot of my formative years in various IRC communities. Nowadays Discord is basically IRC++ so it's been a while since I've bothered digging up my paid-for mIRC number.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:52 PM on August 27, 2018


Love IRC. Time to revisit good ol' bash.org!
posted by cobain_angel at 11:20 AM on August 28, 2018


Nice post! Thanks!
posted by MindK at 2:15 PM on September 23, 2018


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