I used IRC (a lot) in the early 90s. I built the first online texas holdem poker game hosted as an IRC bot around 1994. There were a few hundred players, many o

I used IRC (a lot) in the early 90s. I built the first online texas holdem poker game hosted as an IRC bot around 1994. There were a few hundred players, many of them asked to play for real money. People created graphical clients and another guy extended the code to add tournament rules. Apparently poker pro chris ferguson first started playing poker on IRC. I definitely missed a huge opportunity to monetize it. IRC these days is a bit of a mess with custom authentication protocols that make it too hard to use. Slack is extremely easy to setup for an organization and just works.