“Of the many feature requests I have received over the years, only a handful have actually made it into mIRC.”
#MOST POPULAR WINDOWS IRC CLIENT SOFTWARE#
Developing software is a fine balancing act: you want to be attentive and receptive to user requests but at the same time you want to avoid software bloat,” he writes.
“Most of the features in mIRC were requested by users. The client, which was so extensible that it included its own scripting language, was definitely one for power users, though in an FAQ, Mardam-Bey says that he’s been picky about what he actually adds.
At its peak, it had been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. So in 1994, he started developing what became mIRC, a client that eventually became hugely popular around the world after its early 1995 release. While a student in London, Mardam-Bey saw a lot of potential for a chat client, but the options out there at the time he started developing were mostly text-based and weren’t very easy to use. But the results, in some ways, couldn’t be more different. If you break things down, the reasons Khaled Mardam-Bey developed his popular Windows client mIRC aren’t all that dissimilar to the reasons Stewart Butterfield and company built Slack. (via the mIRC website) The most popular IRC client, mIRC, reflects a different era of software development Now, that control is very much still there, but put into the hands of, say, Facebook, rather than a bunch of annoying moderators.Īn example of the mIRC client. The control of a certain chat room or server was much more obvious way back when. In many ways, IRC’s dynamics have been discarded with for most online interactions. Accidentally log into the server too many times in a couple of minutes? Banned from the server.
#MOST POPULAR WINDOWS IRC CLIENT MOD#
Look at a mod the wrong way? Kicked out, or even banned from the channel. One of the most memorable things about IRC, besides the conversations, were the power dynamics-for example, the ease at which you could get banned from a channel, or a server. That lingo could be seen in the big networks of the era, such as EFnet, which is literally named in reference to a disagreement that happened more than a quarter-century ago, and Undernet, which formed partly in response to the rise of “netsplits,” or the separation of a node from a broader network. It was the kind of nerdy endeavor that predated ICQ, that predated AOL Instant Messenger, and that reflected the wild, somewhat unhinged nature of the internet in the same unvarnished way as Usenet. It was, really, the place you went when you were sick of deathmatches. Generally, my memories of IRC revolved around chatting about emulators and how awesome Quake was. This is basically the only memory I have of IRC being mainstream in any way, shape, or form. (My memory of the chat, which, again, I have no record of: I asked them what their next video would look like, and they told me “a long, warm tunnel.” There was no next video for that album.) So MTV moved the chat with the Butthole Surfers to IRC at the last minute, meaning that if you were in the mood to talk to Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary, and King Coffey about their hit major-label album that featured a graphic drawing of a pencil stabbing someone’s ear, you were hopping into the open internet to converse. One day, MTV hosted an online chat featuring the Butthole Surfers, then riding high on the success of their one mainstream hit, “Pepper.” This was a weird time in American history, when a band named Butthole Surfers could find itself featured in your local newspaper, and the band could feature Erik Estrada in its music videos.Īnyway, the chat was supposed to be on AOL, but this was roughly around the point when AOL was peaking, either just before or just after it had introduced its unlimited pricing tier, so it was facing some infrastructure issues, making AOL’s chatroom a no-go that night.
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