I was a full-blown operator/system administrator across both mainframes and Unix workstations for years. And I never truly felt like I grokked IRC.
Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc.
And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b."
Sorry, I weep for the centralization of these kinds of services. I don't weep even in the slightest for how IRC actually got implemented.
Yeah, I really don't get how people feel like IRC is somehow the pinnacle of chat. Even if you think a lot of the features added by newer applications and protocols are unnecessary or even a negative, it's really hard to argue that IRC isn't a patchwork of incredible cruft built on top of something so barebones that it just did not survive contact with reality.
Plenty of techies love idealized versions of open protocols, even horrible ones like FTP.
Similar story for ubiquitous tools. Shell is a horrible tool with a few lucky features (pipes, focus on text) that's everywhere so it wins by default. And techies turn a blind eye to its million defects.
and of course authentication, when it existed involve, literlaly involved sending your password in plaintext to some user you _hoped_ was the a system bot and not some impersonator.
> Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc.
> And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b."
These things have not really gone away on Discord. On the other hand, it's hard to choose the wrong client when there's only one you're allowed to use.
This totally understates the idiocy of IRC.
I was a full-blown operator/system administrator across both mainframes and Unix workstations for years. And I never truly felt like I grokked IRC.
Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc.
And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b."
Sorry, I weep for the centralization of these kinds of services. I don't weep even in the slightest for how IRC actually got implemented.