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I don't think there was anything about AIM/Yahoo that was better than IRC.
by quesera 6y ago
I don't think there was anything about AIM/Yahoo that was better than IRC.
- Spooky23 6y agoNormal people could use it! The UI was pretty simple. IRC at some level had all of the features, but a learning cliff. My company at the time had E2E encryption with client certificates on AIM.
- quesera 6y agoRight, that's the sadness of it. IRC clients were lacking, and the "auth for free" that came with AIM/Yahoo (and now Facebook) made the difference. It would have been 100x simpler to create a compelling GUI client for IRC (back in the day, they sort of exist now), than to build an entire new protocol, server infrastructure, and GUI client to support a branded and controlled chat. Never mind multiple competing and incompatible versions of same. Conflicting interests, obviously. But as a technology, "chat" did not improve materially between 1990 and 2010 or so.