One aspect of computing and software design that many developers seem to forget nowadays is that over half of the world’s population does not have access to fast Internet and many people, even in developed economies, are limited by bandwidth caps and spotty satellite or mobile Internet access. XKCD Comic #1782: Team Chat ( CC-BY-NC 2.5) It’s the same reason why people like lean websites, plain text email, plain text notes, and so on: the plain text is easy, portable, lean, and pure. Having no multimedia or fancy features such as emoji reactions, integrations, or stickers keeps the bandwidth usage down and the focus on the content of what people are saying, rather than on distracting memes and flashy things. Advantages of plain textĪrguably the best ‘feature’ of IRC is that it’s still all in plain text. Nowadays, IRC is probably not such a good platform for private personal chats, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good for other things. This was a time when Hollywood-style 1337 h4x0rs were pretty much just kids using their modems to make long-distance calls for free.
It was designed to transmit everything in plain text (that is unencrypted) all across the Internets in a time when the use of these computer networks was limited mostly to universities, governments, and large corporations. It is 100% plain text: no images, no videos, no stickers, no emoji reactions, just good ol’ plain text. IRC is a communications protocol created in 1988 and, yeah, it shows. Similar to how I think email is still the best discussion platform, I think there is still a solid place for Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in our lives. Internet Relay Chat is still used (and preferred) by many.
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