![]() I'd log in to IRC and spend the evening, and long into the night, speaking with my "friends" - other "night owls" - on IRC. Since I worked night shift at the hospital, my "waking hours" were what everyone else considered "sleeping hours." Thus, there wasn't much of anything of interest on late night on TV (it was even worse then, than it is now). Living at the time in a very small, central Missouri town whose sidewalks literally rolled up at 7 p.m., IRC was my connection to the "outside world." For me, it was either watch TV or chat on IRC. For those of you who fall in this category, you are in for a treat. Many of you may not have even been involved with computers at that time, and may not have even had a chance to use IRC, the grand-daddy of Internet chat who once ruled the roost. And, if you didn't have an AOL account, that left IRC as the only other way to chat with users who had interests similar to yours across the Internet. The only other way for people to "chat" across the Internet was via America Online, a.k.a. ![]() ICQ would only just be released in late 1996. Yahoo! Messenger (initially known as Yahoo! Pager) was still two years from being released. The Pastīack in 1996, when I was still running Windows 95® and before I knew about Linux, I was running mIRC, a then-popular IRC client, which is still popular among Windows users today. I know this was the case for me, until I started frequenting IRC again (after a lengthy hiatus) when I started working on revitalizing the PCLinuxOS Magazine. In a lot of ways, IRC was the Internet social network of its time. Even today, it lives deep in the shadows of the various Internet social networking sites. However, due to the popularity of instant messenger programs, like Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger, IRC has became the forgotten frontier for a lot of computer users. ![]() It didn't really take off until 1991, during the Gulf War, when updates about the war kept users "tuned in" to their IRC chat channels. IRC was started in 1988 (10 years before Yahoo! released Yahoo! Pager, the forerunner of Yahoo! Messenger). Internet Relay Chat, more commonly referred to as IRC, is one of the older chat services on the internet. The Forgotten Chat Frontier by Paul Arnote
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