Bonum Certa Men Certa

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Turns 35

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 18, 2023

Jarkko Oikarinen

In August 1988 (35 years ago) IRC was "invented" by Jarkko Oikarinen, who was 21 at the time. He was working at the University of Oulu. He has since then earned his Ph.D. (11 years later) at the Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu. I myself started using IRC around 1994 and I'm still using it today, almost 30 years later.

Right now we work to rectify a certificate authority-related issue in our IRC network and we're glad to see that IRC, unlike so many other protocols, is still kicking. Matrix ([matrix]) barely survived a decade. Introduced in September 2014, it already has serious problems [1, 2], particularly Matrix.org.

My Jabber days were over the moment my last employer decided to cease its use for no good reason; too many of the "clown computing" cargo cults decided to trade in their sensitive data (workers' privacy and customers' dignity abandoned) in favour of state/spy-connected harvesting disservices.

With IRC, anyone can roll out one's own network. Let's hope IRC can still be around in 35 years from now, even as a niche ("retro") thing.

Gopher is still used, but it is only a niche and it is younger than IRC (3 years younger). USENET goes back to 1979. To most people, USENET is just "Google Groups" (and Google will probably abandon this too, having already turned it into a highly bloated "webapp", rendering it obsolete for many people).

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