----- Original Message -----
From: "Carlos E. R."
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The Friday 2008-07-18 at 19:48 -0400, Brian K. White wrote:
IRC is a chat thing, but it's about as old as telnet.
Is it? The program "chat" is a console thing and is very old, but I doubt that IRC is as old as that. That's the only chat I have ever used, the *nix chat on my own or friend's computers. Now, I do have "xchat". Is that for IRC?
xchat is for irc, but before there were gui irc clients there were text ones. The oldest is "ircii" (irc 2, meaning there was I guess a "irc" even before that.) And, before there were official irc clients, the protocol itself is theoreticaly doable directly by a human using merely a telnet client, like most of the other the oldest protocols. These days you couldn't do the protocol directly using just a telnet client or even a simpler connector like netcat, but that is merely because the servers all have a lot more users, channels, features, and traffic. Yes talk is older than irc, since it works between users of/on a single host, whereas irc is "internet relay chat" implying it requiers "internet", but, so did telnet, so comparing to talk isn't relevant to my assertion that it's almost as old as telnet. These days I'd recommend bitchx for a text client and xchat for gui, and really, as much as I like text versions of anything possible, irc really is easiest to deal with in gui, in xchat specifically.
I don't frequentchat rooms in general, per se, yet, I do have one that I have been a regular in with a bunch of other like-minded Spider Robinson loving souls for .. gosh 13 or 14 years.
I don't know what a chat room is... O:-)
I have a guess, though. Wikipedia time...
Honestly, as much as I'm trying to point out that theres really nothing new or bad about irc in itself, still, I wouldn't say you are exactly missing the boat on one of trhe great things in life. The sunshine beats it every time. Hell so does rain, I like rain. Perversely, having said that, many of my ultimate best realest truest family-in-all-but-name friends are from that chat room, so have 3 different girlfriends, so, who knows. I'm not sure I could have met the same number of the same quality of people any other way. Maybe I'd be happier, or maybe I'd have just learned to live with what was available. I don't think I could ever, under any circumstances, have been able to enjoy or fake enjoying such wonders as football or most other sports on tv. Playing them is fine, following teams and games on tv? *gag* never. So, that seems to be a pretty big part of everyones life that I see day to day. So I guess I'm pretty glad I was able to find a number of other outcasts to hang out with. BTW, we do actually hang out, irc is how we met, but having met, any of us who are near any others get together at various times for uh, get togethers. -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org