IRC Turns 37
Internet Relay Chat (short: IRC), which started in 1988, turns 37 this month
Things age. Some age gracefully, some disappear very suddenly. Some technology is decentralised, so it endures and survives a lot.
Let's consider IRC, which is turning 37 this month. IRC is great.
The other day (Saturday) I did some digital housecleaning.
This was long coming:
$ uptime 19:50:05 up 666 days, 1:34, 41 users, load average: 0.63, 0.54, 0.50
So the other day I restarted Hex/XChat for the first time in months and started deleting networks that are no longer accessible. Despite hundreds of IRC networks still being accessible online, some quietly perish (ours is doing fine) and about half of the networks in XChat 2.8.8 are already dead, offline.
It's fair to say that many people still use IRC (we have newcomers all the time). It's not hard to use. There's plenty of IRC software out there.
Will IRC make it to 40? For sure! 50? We'll see... but probably yes. █