IRC

Chat rooms were not anywhere near as common.

Yes, IRC did exist at the time, but now you had IRC with a digital avatar, right? You can emote, you can, like, interact in the game world, you can, like, do things together.

Suddenly, like, there, there is a...

Th- there's more than just the idea of talking to people there, but now especially 14 has this problem where no one fucking says anything in game, because everyone is in link shells, everyone is in guild chats, everyone's in a fucking Discord server.

Yeah.

That's Internet Relay Chat.

I have no idea what Hispano IRC is.

Why in the world...

In technology, uh, the personal computer revolution continued accelerating as computers became increasingly common in homes, schools, and offices.

A young Finnish student named Jarkko Oikarinen created Internet Relay Chat, or IRC-

Oh-ho

... helping establish one of the earliest popular forms of real-time online communication.

Everyone met one another in person, often for the first time.

I actually wonder whether it was BBSs they met up at that point or whether it was IRC, Internet Relay Chat.

I'm not actually sure.

I think that it might have been networks that started off as BBSs that moved to a more regular internet structure by then.

The, we've updated the page, so we have three things that are happening on that page.

One, and the most significant one, is we have now integrated in an IRC chat server, right? To the site.

Uh, the I- the IRC chat server can be accessed through the website itself, uh, uh, or it can be accessed through, um, your own IRC client.

So we do have the credentials for how to get to the IR- your own IRC client.

Uh, or you can go to our IRC client, which is called, a web thing called The Lounge, and, uh, it, it can go there as well.

So I will post on the chat a couple different ways to get into the vExpert portal and use the chat service.

But what it does have is it has all of the categories that we, we supported on Discord.

Yes.

I did eventually have one of those friends in a good gesture buy me a Something Awful forum account.

But generally, like I was MegaTokyo forums for AIM conversations and then moved over to IRC eventually.

Did you ever have ICQ? You remember ICQ?

I had an ICQ.

I don't really have many fond memories of that particular era.

I prefer Discord these days.

Discord is like the modern evolution of IRC, which is basically fine.

But like I would eventually start running Trillian, and I would have an MSN Messenger.

In 1996, there was, do you guys know what IRC is? No.

So IRC was sort of like a proto-AIM instant messaging service.

Internet Relay Chat is

what it stands for.

And they had a group called the Enforcers, which does go hard.

There's also something, I mean, when I was younger, there was always something so amazing about talking to someone from another country.

When I first started on the internet, there was something called IRC, Internet Relay Chat, where you would just join this channel and there would be people from the US and Australia and the UK and France.

And, you know, back then making a phone call to an international country was costing you hundreds of thousands of rands a minute.

So to...

It was created in 1995 by two Americans, by a guy named Peter Giordano.

It existed in something called Internet Relay Chat, which was an encrypted system initially formed by the KGB.

So does an average citizen have access? to an encrypted system in 1995 or whatever by the KGB? Oh, yeah.

You just look it up, right? They mail you the code.