So, here's a fun historical detail.<p>ISO 646[0] was a 7-bit character encoding, of which ASCII is a superset. It defined a common subset of characters that would always be available, leaving a few codepoints for local supersets to fill in. ASCII used some of those for punctuation, but Scandinavian character sets[1] filled them with extra lowercase and uppercase letters with diacritics.<p>IRC came from Finland, so it was designed for those charsets.<p>But the standard for the Internet is supposed to be ASCII, so what happens when you use those codes from ASCII that correspond to extra letters in the Scandinavian character sets? Take a look at RFC 1459:[2]<p><pre><code> Because of IRC's scandanavian origin, the characters {}| are
considered to be the lower case equivalents of the characters []\,
respectively. This is a critical issue when determining the
equivalence of two nicknames.
</code></pre>
Cute, right? Try it, it actually works (at least on Freenode!).<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646#National_variants" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646#National_variants</a><p>[2] <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459" rel="nofollow">http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459</a> § 2.3
IRC's longevity and appeal is fascinating - it seems like that the more constrained the bandwidth of communication, the more compact the configuration, and the more quirky and charismatic everyone's favourite clients (be they irssi, weechat, mIRC, xchat...) the more staying power a comms medium has. My workplace started off life ~15 years ago as a channel on a small student IRC network - the company effectively evolved out of IRC. The importance of IRC bots (be they eggdrops, or pircbot, or whatever) also seems to have become core to IRC culture - a well implemented IRC bot can be an incredibly powerful tool for glueing a community together.<p>All this makes it incredibly hard when considering what could come after IRC, if anything. XMPP's MUCs just don't seem to have the same sticking power, and meanwhile things like Slack and HipChat come along and risk hijacking all our comms into closed silos rather than the relative openness of IRC and XMPP.<p>Regardless, after 15 years of addiction to IRC we're having a go at coming up with something better that still has some of the same appeal. The project is called Matrix.org, and the main differences to IRC are:<p>* Open federation; anyone can spin up a server and join in.
* Conversation history (i.e. scrollback) is the main building block - a room's history is stored (partially or completely) over all the servers who are participating in a room. So there's no single point of control or failure.
* Compulsory cryptographically signed message history (necessary due to the open federation)
* Simple HTTP/JSON client-server API. (Server-server API is also HTTPS/JSON)
* Store arbitrary structured data in the room - not just text messages. So you can use it for setting up VoIP calls; whiteboarding info; random device telemetry, or whatever.
* Built-in distributed file storage (no more DCC, for better or worse)
* Strong identity and end-to-end encryption (via a variant of Axolotl; currently in dev)
* Support for 3rd party IDs - contact people based on their mail address, phone number, or whatever details folks chose to identify themselves by.<p>So if you like IRC and are interested in a fairly radical alternative, please drop by <a href="http://matrix.org/beta" rel="nofollow">http://matrix.org/beta</a> and say hi. It's in early beta, but it's fairly usable - we have Android and iOS clients and SDKs for python, perl, iOS, Android and an increasingly active dev community. Also, it's not frozen yet, so now is a great chance to get involved and make sure we get it right :)
IRC is awesome. The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history. In that important feature Twitter/Slack is superior.<p>By the way, #startups on freenode seems to have the most HN users on it.
Here an old IRC addict :)<p>/me also was the developer of XDCC <a href="http://xa.bi/files/irc/xdcc.3.3.0b.irc" rel="nofollow">http://xa.bi/files/irc/xdcc.3.3.0b.irc</a><p>Good old times!
The IRCv3 working group (<a href="http://ircv3.org" rel="nofollow">http://ircv3.org</a>), comprising server and client developers, continues to work on new features. The latest update is expected to be finalized around the end of March.
I wrote an Irc script called TextBox as a teenager. Among other things it was one of the first that could implement Irc bots via DCC RAW tcp connections from the script itself, allowing you to martial armies of channel takeover bots. Seemed cool when I was 15, and it was actually through Irc channel wars that I learned the basics of network protocol design.
Anyone else has the issue that every IRC channel seems dead? If I'm very lucky, I'll find an active channel, but it will die in about a month. Perhaps I am simply not looking in the right places.
If I recall correctly, a few PC games used irc code as the basis of there networking stack.<p>irc2 script was what really got me into programming all those years ago. At one point I had VT100 codes spammed to the status line in order to draw blocks on the screen for an in chat tetris game drawn in ascii. I also managed to hack out of the sandbox the client was running in by setting the ENCRYPT_PROGRAM feature to /bin/sh. Good times.
Twitch chat is also running on top of IRC. You can connect to their irc servers and use the twitch chat from your irc client. With limited capabilities I might add (no private messages for one). More info: <a href="http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitch-irc" rel="nofollow">http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitc...</a>
Though there is no indication on the web page, the "Last Modified" tag says 4/29/2000, 4:45:46 PM.<p>I believe that should be mentioned in the title of this post. Because the following text from the page felt misleading.<p><pre><code> "The first IRC server (and still running) was tolsun.oulu.fi .."</code></pre>