IRC Is an Insanely Simple Protocol

This is where I’d usually make some joke about “if you remember, back in the day…” but… given how Freenode and Libera have been in the news recently for Freenode’s rather hostile takeover (and suicide), You probably know what IRC is. So. IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, is a really old (as in, 1988) protocol for text-based communications between users on a network. And the cool part is, it’s so simple that it’s almost funny. Like, let’s take a look. You could actually, with only a few minutes of reading, just enter raw IRC protocol lines by hand and have a perfectly valid and functional session.