ircII Has Turned 35
Daniel Stenberg (wolfSSL) wrote a decent history of IRC, collaboratively
"ircII was released 1989 by Michael Sandrof," says Daniel Stenberg of Curl fame. Wikipedia states "it is the oldest IRC client still maintained." It's written in C, it predates the Web, and its Web site is still online:
The software was built as recently as this month, or its files were touched by a script:
Here is the news file: (file last touched but not modified early today)
Changes in ircII 20240603:
o fix some issues in choosing the window a message belongs to
Changes in ircII 20240326:
o fix hang in /window create o fix problem in dcc_chatpeers_func() with no peers o fix problems with new_realloc(0) o updates for the manual
Don't listen to people who say IRC is "dead" or Discord is a replacement (or Slack for that matter). IRC is lean, easy to deploy, and generally works with hundreds of client software. It's simpler and faster to interact over IRC than over bloated, clunky stuff like Mastodon.
IRC is for practical people, not "neckbeards". Its pragmatism is measured not in clicks or "engagement". A lot of important work still gets done over hundreds of IRC networks. IRC is not controlled by a company, so nobody pays the media for hype or "buzz" about it. That's better that way - same as Gemini Protocol. █