I have been using IRC since about 1991, and it has been a technical and social resource for me. I am wondering if there is an AAC IRC channel, and if not, would anyone be interested in one?

 

'Conversations' are accessible on your Profile page.

 

'Conversations' are accessible on your Profile page.

Yes, but conversations are one-to-one, IRC is a group activity—very different.

 

Yes, but conversations are one-to-one, IRC is a group activity—very different.

You can have any number of participants in a conversation here, not just yourself and one other person.

 

Can you join a conversation without being invited?

 

Can you join a conversation without being invited?

No.

 

No.

Ah, well. That, and the non-real-time nature of them makes them quite different from IRC.

It may just not be something the community is interested in.

 

They did that private channel thing at ETO not that many people joined in conversations, let alone private ones. Although it would allow collaboration to take place but it would be few and far between.

kv

 

They did that private channel thing at ETO not that many people joined in conversations, let alone private ones. Although it would allow collaboration to take place but it would be few and far between.

kv

The advantage of IRC is the real-time and open nature. You can hang out while you work, converse without a demand for immediate response, collaborate, and help people in a more dynamic way. I've been part of programmer communities where IRC was essential, and I believe it is a great tool. But, it does require that the community is interested or it will not take off.

 

IRC was the Internet's first "killer app" for me. My good friend had just moved to another state and we needed a way to keep in touch for free (we couldn't afford frequent long distance calls). My dad had a 486 laptop with Internet access, so I used Alta Vista search and came across this thing called Internet Relay Chat. I had no idea how it worked, but installed a free Windows client called mIRC and instructed my friend to do the same. Soon we were fluent in the new medium and invited several other far-away friends. With all the daily interaction, we no longer felt remote. It was great.

In time, I started to explore IRC. The protocol allows users to be in zero or more "channels", which are chat rooms loosely dedicated to some specific subject. (Fun fact: the hashtag phenomenon started with IRC channels. For example, if you wanted to talk to people about the Super Bowl, you could join the #superbowl channel.) I met all kinds of interesting people from all over the world. One person, whose nick (username) was "Man Page", introduced me to another type of OS called UNIX. I was fascinated by the idea of computer networks, that machines thousands of miles away could communicate with each other. Man Page told me how UNIX exposes the network details far more than Windows. He suggested that my ISP might even offer shell access as part of its service. It did, and soon I was learning how to use the SunOS command line.

The shell itself was incredibly limited, but it was enough to inspire me to want more. I had heard about a relatively new OS called Linux, and bought a dozen floppies to install Slackware on an old 386 behemoth my dad had gifted me for the purpose. It took a few tries and several hours, but I finally had root access to my own networkable UNIX-like OS. I bought a book on TCP/IP, learned the basics of networking, and got my 386 connected to the net. It was thrilling. I downloaded and compiled an IRC client for UNIX called BitchX. Curious about how it worked, I started browsing the source code.

The Windows mIRC client had a pretty powerful scripting language that I had figured out how to use, and since it was roughly C-like in syntax, I could follow the BitchX code surprisingly well. I became inspired to learn C and bought K&R. Within a year I had written my own IRC client in C (using ncurses for the interface). A couple of years -- and a lot of systems-level programming -- after that, I had a job as a Linux sysadmin that I eventually leveraged into a software dev role. I was no longer a broke college drop-out. That job experience got me in the door at a large corp, which paid for my EE undergraduate and is currently paying for my MS in CS. And I can honestly say that it all started with IRC, so I have a very fond spot in my heart for it.

 

For me, IRC is still very relevant. I still have a terminal window with Irssi running on three networks. In the past, I was an IRCop on several networks including EFNet and freenode, but I faded away from that.

I used mIRC for at lease a decade. When Apple released OS X, I switched to Macs and haven't looked back unless I am forced to. I had a long and profitable career based on Windows, but I also used UNIX, and later Linux so having a natively UNIX-like OS was a boon, I also liked the hardware. At that time, there was no good graphical IRC client for OS X, well, none that could replace mIRC, so I switched to Irssi in console mode and got very comfortable with it.

I believe IRC still offers something that is hard to improve upon, and things like Slack are just boogered up IRC for the most part. Mind you, I do like some of the enhancements, but the stripped down, client oriented feature set of IRC is just enough to be supremely useful without being hard to use.

I wouldn't consider starting any AAC channel without consensus and administrative consent, that's what I brought it up. Bt there seems little appetite for it, so, I'll just move on.

 

In the past, I was an IRCop on several networks including EFNet and freenode, but I faded away from that.

I, too, was an IRCop (for a Belgian server on NewNet) for a couple of years.

/wallop good memories

 

IRC, the breeding ground for a generation of scriptkiddies, leet speakers, OOB packets, poorly designed modems that would echo hangup AT commands, servers so poorly configured that a simple packet sent in the name of a client would result in "No route to host" disconnects, and certainly a great place for fertile minds to imagine picking up imaginary hot chicks. Not that I would know about such things, but I do read

But that is a rather curmudgeonly view:

Is not freenode still a "thing" to satisfy a lust for nostalgia?

http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode&chat=electronics

 

IRC, the breeding ground for a generation of scriptkiddies, leet speakers, OOB packets, poorly designed modems that would echo hangup AT commands...

Well, I wasn't among the kiddies, I was already aged out. As I mentioned, I started in about '91, right at the start of EFNet, when I was already in my 30s.

I used IRC for other things too, like remote monitoring and systems administration of various systems that ran agents I had written which connected to my own IRC server and provided logging and remote control.

Yes, freenode is still up and running, so is EFNet. It's not nostalgia for me, it's current events. I use it for social and technical interaction, and i think it's an excellent medium for it.

Yes, there were silly people on IRC, they used trivial exploits to annoy others and had "wars" over channels and other nonsense. But that's not the part I was interested in.

 

/--/
Yes, freenode is still up and running, so is EFNet. It's not nostalgia for me, it's current events. I use it for social and technical interaction, and i think it's an excellent medium for it.
/--/

Well, then there you go. It's not for me, but what you are saying is that it is still around and working.