[Off-Topic] What are some cool/interesting facts that people don't know about IRC? reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2022-03-23 17:57 **It predates the World Wide Web.** The first time I was on the Internet was 1992, and the computing services department had sent me a "cheat sheet" of things I could do. * The word "internet" was not used. I had no idea what it was. That word was largely informal and irregularly used for much of the Internet's early days. * I had no idea I was logged into an all-text shell account on a Unix- based machine (probably SunOS). What is "$"? * My whole template for understanding "online" was bulletin board systems, so I was not sure what I was looking at. Anyway, the cheat sheet contained short instructions for the following: * E-mail (Pine) * Newsgroups * Gopher / Veronica / Jughead * WAIS * WWW (text mode browser; unsure which.) * **IRC** * FTP * Telnet I remember being paranoid I was going to be billed for all of these "long-distance connections," with the US phone service being my only template for understanding this. So far as I recall the Web was in its infancy, but IRC goes back into the late 80s. We had to use Kermit to transfer files down from our shell account to floppies. IRC was exciting because of the distances; I had already done realtime chat for several years via ddial (Diversi-Dial), but IRC was much, much larger. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- JaFakeItTillYouJaMak · 2022-03-23 20:08 Wait this is off topic? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- JaFakeItTillYouJaMak · 2022-03-23 20:10 oh good that verified something I thought but I was young at the time and Im' lazy now to look up. Was is Lynx perchanse that was all the rage when I was coming up. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LameBMX · 2022-03-23 22:19 Something that should be known, but people often fail to really understand is that IRC is a protocol. If you want a fun challenge, try out using IRC via telnet. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- anths · 2022-03-23 22:59 The first “network client” I wrote, almost 25 years ago, was an “IRC client” that was basically that but it did the ping responses for you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LameBMX · 2022-03-23 23:07 Pong ---------------------------------------------------------------------- McDutchie · 2022-03-24 01:39 > WWW (text mode browser; unsure which.) Very likely [Lynx](https://lynx.invisible-island.net/), that was the original one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cos · 2022-03-24 04:38 Mostly, people don't know that IRC exists :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cos · 2022-03-25 14:33 I used to telnet in to act as a server, too, not just a client - originally, there was no authentication so anyone could do that. It made it easy to add new IRC servers to the IRC net (there was only one network), since you could just look up the names of some existing servers and configure yours to connect to them. For that reason, even after the ability to configure your server to restrict what other servers could connect to it was added, many servers didn't use that feature - to make it easier for other sites to join IRC. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- evolvingfridge · 2022-03-26 16:42 you can (or may be could) send message to offline user like this: /msg MemoServ SEND {nick | channel} memo-text ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kegdoctor · 2022-04-03 03:42 It is capable through vast amounts of scripting in a .lua like format that is very capable of doing nearly anything on a pc. Can also Automate a vast amount of things on a PC. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Yin2x · 2022-04-14 23:16 Not all servers had memoserv tho. We used efnet and dalnet servers and only dalnet had memoserv ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Yin2x · 2022-04-14 23:23 It connects people to groups and was my source of up to date information during a riot in 1998. We get information quicker in the groups compared to newspaper or news channels. It was useful in the sense that we know which area to avoid as random people post updates. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- evolvingfridge · 2022-04-15 03:07 freenode also had ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lazy-xo · 2022-05-19 23:34 US DoD’s Tactical Chat uses IRC - it’s one of the most widely used chat protocols in Command and Control, communications in real time from a big ass AWACS in Eastern Europe to a Marine on an island in the pacific… ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lazy-xo · 2022-05-19 23:38 Not just a protocol - it’s THE protocol. The RFC is just 64 pages - https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1459.txt worth the read. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LateCat682 · 2022-06-20 00:05 dir ls cd..