Happy 30th IRC
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6 years ago in #technology by drakos (70)
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There are many weaknesses in the IRC-protocol, particularly that every server admin efficiently is a superuser in the network. This was probably the root cause of the bit split between IRCNet and EFNet. The total amount of IRC users continued climbing after the split, but the percentage of total Internet users using IRC started falling rapidly after this. Then we got commercial silos ... it's terrible, like I have 5-6 different chat applications on my telephone, many of them connected to chat networks that are unavailable from the laptop, and yet I cannot even connect to my wife even as she's at completely different chat networks than me... :-(
Anyone can run their own IRCd server/network, if superusers was a concern, the code is open source. Also, many users migrated from EFNet to LinkNET because it had native SSL, very much appreciated for security. Later on, a Blowfish client addon became another option for encryption regardless if the server was using SSL or not.
Today it's not so much a problem, as all IRC clients easily can connect to as many servers/network as necessary - but we're dropping the "relay" part and "network" part if everyone is supposed to run their own standalone server or their own small network.
Back in 1996 it was a also a huge practical problem for the end-users as (almost?) all client software assumed there should be one and only one IRC network, after the split one had to choose what network to connect to. Being connected to both was of course physically possible, but impractical.
In a perfect network topology, there shouldn't be such a great difference between clients and servers - everyone should be able to connect to the network and relaying messages. As said, with IRC every server administrator efficiently was a super user. This meant it was non-trivial to add new servers - every new server and server admin would need to be approved and vetted by the community. That's the reason why they had to throw out the Eris server - it was too liberal on whom was allowed to connect as a server.
Reading your email how everything begun makes me to feel so old, there is so much happened between 80's and now. I love the time when everything just started, the time when our computer have had black screen and we were learning to write algorithms in schools, so we had green letters on black screen I loved it although to tell the truth did not understand much of that.
Also the time of first email, I remember I could not imagine that it is a letter but that arrives immediately to the recipient within seconds or minute just depending on the connection. Also as you mentioned correctly once we were sending large (relatively large) files to someone and it took a while but by the end of the month my mother was so crossed with us because we received a bill of 500 USD for that month!
Now I see that the history is repeating when our children while playing computer games makes us mad when we see the bills for that. Luckily, it did not happen with our son, but I hear on and off stories.
I love the stage where we are now in computer technology and the development still in process, I am very excited about that and you are right back to the roots: Cheers, Happy 30th IRC!
Twitch is keeping the IRC dinosaur going in the millions.
Hi @drakos! We are @steem-ua, a new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation! Your post is eligible for our upvote! Thanks for your contribution, keep up the good work, and feel free to join our Discord server!
@drakos this is not the subject of your post... I'm sorry, but I forgot to thank you for supporting my post with the dragonfly photo.
I liked it because I took a few snapshots of a dragonfly few days ago! I'll post it later.
I'll wait for your dragonfly post!
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I started writing a series on chat networks, I still have to complete it ...
Good old ICQ!
What was good with ICQ? I found it very annoying that so many fled from IRC to ICQ, I saw no benefits in ICQ.
It was another means of messaging. I used it for a while, got flooded with Filipino friends lol.
LOVED IRC! We had our own chat room in my small hometown when I was a teenager. So much happened on there!
thx for reminding me... 30 years already... am I that old... by the way: do you know when I found my name Rival? It was with ICQ some long time ago i still know my number, lol