EFNet saved my life because I was able to go in there and talk to people who were in recovery and had dealt with the same issue and got a lot of good feedback….” “I was dealing with chemical depression at the time. “When I was on that channel it saved my life during a time of deep depression,” she once told me. I remember a woman named Lori G., who lived in Berkeley, California and was using EFNet to access chats devoted to recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. I skipped Mike Tyson’s pay-per-view boxing match in 2006 to watch someone describe it on IRC.īut that anonymous online community also worked its way into our lives in other ways. I created keyboard macros that spewed out ASCII art. I was the know-it-all music snob who got kicked out of a chat channel someone set up at Woodstock ’94. There was a server with a bot that played Boggle. I used IRC in the early 1990s, when there were all kinds of fun things to do. “Instead of having separate servers, IRC linked the servers together, which allowed all the users to be present in the same network.” (Whereas when Slack goes down - like it did this week - thousands of users suddenly go offline simultaneously.) But he also cites anonymity - the disposable, user-chosen handles - as “what makes IRC special.” IRC’s creator Jarkko Oikarinen has attributed some of its success to its built-in decentralization. It’s a time for not only sharing some memories, but also marveling at the traits that gave IRC its great longevity.

We’ve just reached the 30th anniversary of Internet Relay Chat ( IRC) - making it one of the longest-lived communication protocols still in use on the internet today.

Hunting mirc chat