Last month, Mozilla’s envoy announced the decommissioning of within “ the next small number of months“, and moving all communication to a new, or at least different system. Nevertheless, despite a shift in mainstream and everyday communication behavior, IRC is still relevant enough today, and going especially strong in the open source community, with freenode, as one of the oldest networks, being the most frequently used one, along some smaller ones like OFTC and Mozilla’s own dedicated network. What was once a refuge to escape the real world has since become the fundamental centerpiece of that same real world, and our ways of communicating with each other has moved on with it.

Those days of glory, however, have long been gone, and with it the version of an internet where IRC was the ideal choice. How it would turn from a simple, decentralized real-time communication system for university-internal use into a global phenomenon, connecting millions of users all over the world, forming its own subculture, eventually reaching mainstream status in some parts of the world - including a Eurodance song about a bot topping European music charts. Last year marked the 30th anniversary of the Internet Relay Chat protocol (IRC) and it is hard to imagine that could have foreseen the impact his invention would one day have on the world as we know it.

Downlaod mirc free for life