Receive a message from WhatsApp Nowadays, in the middle of 2022, it can make more than one user who had the fortune to know the world before the existence of the internet nostalgic.
Since therefore it had to go through a complex tunnel, full of happy punk, boy bands, MTV and software connected to the network but very rudimentary. This was the case with those of us who once inhabited an IRC channel.
We are talking about a network that existed a couple of decades ago, a little longer, that was even the predecessor of the legendary MSN Messenger, and that at the time represented one of the most advanced and exclusive ways of conversing in real time with someone on the internet. other side of the connection.
However, not everything can last forever and with IRC a sad case was experienced, particularly in the Hispanic sector, where community intrigues and vile deals between companies outside the software ended up blowing everything up.
A requiem for IRC: long live WhatsApp?
IRC was an innovative and brutal protocol at the time of its launch. As you read back there, it was an Internet protocol itself, just like HTTP or the increasingly forgotten FTP.
It was created in 1988 by the Finnish developer Jarko Oikarinen from the facilities of the University of Oulu in Finland.
It started as a project to replace another chat program but then grew and became a completely separate monster.
Where its structure of channels, the requirement of server maintenance and the use of commands to start some specific actions in the chat rooms made this community not accessible to everyone, serving as a natural filter.
In one of its best moments, around the year 2002, the IRC-Hispanic channel reached more than 45 thousand users. But it was there that the attempt to implement a charging system for the use of nicknames began. That among other measures and private acquisitions ended up screwing everything up.
In 2004 came Facebookand little by little began the boom of messaging applications that ended up giving the coup de grâce, especially with the arrival of WhatsApp.
By 2011 there were just over 25,000 users on the Latin channel and in 2015 the IRC-Hispano disappeared to rebrand itself as ‘Hispanic chat‘.
The platform is still there, in its own way, but it is not even the shadow of what it was. For his part, Oikarinen, the creator of IRC, technically etched his name into history with this chat protocol, but he’s had an interesting track record nonetheless.
He was general manager of Nokia during the company’s period of greatest splendor as a mobile phone manufacturer and telecommunications provider, then, in 2016, he began a new stage at Google, developing its applications such as Hangouts and Meetups.
In a way, the trail of IRC prevails there in those instant messaging services. Although it is not the same.