IRC, SMTP, IMAP are protocols from back when desktop operating systems didn’t even come with TCP/IP. They would use a single connection for unlimited messages.

IRC, SMTP, IMAP are protocols from back when desktop operating systems didn’t even come with TCP/IP. They would use a single connection for unlimited messages. I was using a “modern” chat program, AOL Instant Messenger. Alright, the missing part of my story was that I was also using a proxy program to share a single connection with my brothers. NAT wasn’t widely available yet, and Winmodems were much easier to find than hardware modems. (And I hadn’t discovered Linux and the free Unixes yet.) So, every TCP connection that AIM made was 2 connections in the proxy program. We quickly discovered that AIM on more than one computer at a time made the entire Internet unusable. Every generation of developers decries the next generation for bloat, but Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking that made the computer so much snappier (plus other features), at the cost of multiple times more RAM needed than Windows 3.1. (16 MB was the unofficial minimum, and often painfully small. Microsoft’s official minimum was impractical back then.) Windows XP had protected memory that made it more feasible to run multiple applications, because they were much less likely to crash each other (plus other features, including a TCP/IP stack featuring NAT and a useful connection limit), at another several multiples more RAM needed. There have always been tradeoffs. Back in the day, programs were small and developers focused more on making sure they did not crash, because they didn’t have lots of RAM and crashing would often require the computer to reboot. That developer focus meant less focus on delivering features to users. (Also, security has often meant bloat.) Now, you barely need to know anything about computer science, and you can deliver applications to users, at the cost of ginormous runtime requirements.