IRC

[Cromulent]

I'm curious how many of you use IRC these days? I had a long break from using it (5 years or so) but I've just set it up again. Nowadays people seem to use Discord which is fine and honestly that is what I used while I wasn't using IRC.

If you do use IRC are there any decent channels out there which are good for chatting? I'm on Libera, OFTC and Freenode at the moment.

 

[Cromulent]

I don’t, but I find things from the ‘old internet’ which are still active quite fascinating.

Usenet (NNTP) is still going strong these days as well.

 

[Cromulent]

I've been using weechat but I could really do with using an IRC bouncer.

 

[Cromulent]

I used to be heavily involved in IRC in the late 90’s early 2000’s. I used mIRC and Pirch98. Would create my own scripts and was part of the movement which regularly hacked the MSN offering when it used Exchnage 5.5 and ultimately moved to MSN Messenger.

Got up to a whole host of no good, met several woman, etc. Ah, youth.

I was more into ICQ back in the 90s. Was fun as hell to me as a teenager .

 

[Cromulent]

Ah memories! I had similar issues back in the late 90s with stupidly high phone bills and the same upset Dad when he opened it! Then thankfully along came the likes of Screaming.net and Redhotant with 0800 access and then later BT FRIACO. The kids these days dont know how good they have it!

I remember when we first got ADSL and it was amazing. Not having to block the phone to browse the web was a such a massive change.

 

[Cromulent]

Twitter stole the "hashtag" thing from IRC.

It's still used in some places. The military still use it. It's reliable, low demand and easy to set up in a closed/air gapped system. Unlike a lot of modern alternatives...

 

[Cromulent]

I remember ISDN being very good for low pings. Maybe better than what we have now!

Low ping *******!

 

[Cromulent]

IRC ?

what about ICQ ?

ICQ - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Yep. Spent a long time using ICQ as well. The chat roulette was always fun.

 

[Cromulent]

My ICQ number was 1776683, that's imprinted in my brain!

So much stuff I have forgotten. I remember buying Windows ME and then not being able to get it to work. Also there were those RAM expanding programs which were a total scam but I didn't know it at the time.