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comments from 2000, when AIM chatrooms were the alternative. crazy these people are making observations about a brand new thing at the time, that everyone just takes for granted now. i used IRC to pirate death metal songs.
IRC is still the main way I keep in touch with my nerdier friends. Quality of conversations have gone way up after it dropped off the mainstream as well. Highly recommend.
When was IRC mainstream?
Late 90s, at least in Norway. Everyone with access to the internet would hang out on IRC. The biggest channels were named after countries or cities, and were packed with teenagers DM-ing random people asking “ASL?”. The nerds would hang out on other channels, of course.
Usenet was also mainstream around the same time, until it lost out to web forums.
“Everyone with access to the Internet” wasn’t a lot of people in the 1990s yet, or was it?
For home Internet it depended on where you lived. There were a lot of people online from a nearby city, but my rural town didn’t have that many. Not sure how Norway compared to other countries.
What we did have in abundance, though, was print magazines about computers and the Internet. Some came with a floppy disk (later a CD) with downloaded websites on them. I remember accessing a Marilyn Monroe fan page via floppy disk in the early days. All those magazines wrote about stuff you could do on the Internet, like send emails, use Usenet, chat on IRC, and even do instant messaging using ICQ.
So a lot of people knew about this stuff even without home Internet. And we tried it out in the computer lab at school, where the rest of the kids saw it. So I’d say enough kids born in the early 80s experienced enough IRC that I’d call it mainstream, at least compared to today.