N Things I Miss About IRC

If you cut your cyber-teeth on MySpace and Facebook, you probably won’t recognize the face of Khaled Mardam-Bay. For millions (yes, millions) of us, though, he is the Zuckerberg of the 20th century (that’s where the IRC generation comes from), and IRC is where we took our first cyber-steps. You may want to hit Google and do some digital archeology to find out about IRC in general and mIRC in particular. Meanwhile, I just want to list down all the things that IRC meant to us, the generation that was exhilarated when we upgraded from a Hercules to a CGA monitor. So join me as I reminisce about life online in the last decade… after the nag screen.

• IRC was the real social networking medium

  Facebook, to me, is a collection of friends and family I already know. I hesitate before adding a total stranger as a friend on Facebook, unless I have interacted with that person atleast once elsewhere. On IRC, it was normal practice to chat up with complete strangers. Except the “a/s/l, m too, bye” kind of people, the majority of IRCers would be called “open networkers” in the Web2.0 lingo, always ready to strike up a mature conversation with anyone who said hi.

• IRC had brains, not avatars

  Some of those brains were twisted and others were outright rotten, but there were a lot of healthy brains around to interact with. Instead of pretty profile pictures, university names or huge contact lists, people were judged by their nicks and their chat styles. Personal brand building did not mean adding 5000 facebook friends and going “omg-I-have-so-many-friends-that-I-need-to-delete-some!!” – it took a very slow and organic route.

• IRC was our instant messenger

  Before ICQ and Yahoo Messenger, the (m)IRC Notify list served as the IM. You could see when your friends logged on/off and you could immediately start a DCC conversation with them.

• IRC had social games

  There were channels dedicated to social games. You could join a multiplayer trivia game on #trivia (and curse your pathetic dialup connection) or play chess, hangman or other word games. Some scripts even kept a highscore list. The games were not as pretty or colorful as their Facebook counterparts, but they were realtime and fun!

• IRC had peer-to-peer downloads

  Way before bittorrent and edonkey, IRC channels had people sharing files, with a complete search and download queuing system. The IRC CDCC file transfer protocol and the resume functionality was all you needed to download “stuff”. A lot of ingenious solutions were scripted out to tackle the bandwidth and computing resources of those days.

• IRC had collaborative, crowd-sourced projects

  Most of the much-anticipated books (Harry Potter, for example) would be digitized and leaked/shared on IRC in few hours after their release. Even though not entirely legal, they were a great example of distributed collaborative projects

• IRC was the help desk and expert-exchange

  Many firms ran their official help desks using IRC, and still do! The Facebook Developer Channel, for example, something that I find very ironic. Volunteer experts also took out the time to help out strangers on special topic channels, like #java or #c++, in realtime – for free – strange but true.

• IRC was better than Twitter

  All you needed was to register your own channel and set its channel topic (which even had a twitter-like character limit) to tell the whole world what you were upto. Actually, private conversations and public broadcasts over IRC were a lot more convenient than twitter.

• IRC had real-time citizen journalism

  News about natural and man-made disasters usually reached IRC before the professional media, and at times, people actually experiencing (and not merely observing) the event were the ones reporting live. Whenever an important incident occured somewhere, the corresponding city/country’s IRC channel immediately started filling up, and the channel used to become a news website, blog, discussion forum and press conference – all rolled into one.

• IRC was about sharing

  I believe that today’s Web2.0/Social Media scene is driven by self-centered promotion, ego inflation or outright narcissism, and revolves around life-streaming and broadcasting yourself via your status messages. In contrast, IRC was about sharing in realtime. We shared news and infromation, we shared knowledge, we actually spent time together online, we shared ideas – we even shared dialup acccounts passwords when a frequent channel visitor was running low on dialup minutes.

[TO BE CONTINUED…]

PS. This is a half-finished post that was just sitting there in my drafts for the last few weeks – until Faisal Qureshi’s Facebook status prompted me to publish it in its half-written form. I have a few more things to add to it – perhaps later.