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We're talking about IRC, right? Joining a random channel in the 90's would pretty much have 'A/S/L?" as a standard greeting..
by unilynx 5y ago
We're talking about IRC, right? Joining a random channel in the 90's would pretty much have 'A/S/L?" as a standard greeting..
- TimTheTinker 5y agoI don't think hacker-oriented channels or IRC featured this greeting as often as general chat (ICQ/AIM).
- unilynx 5y agoThere was a time where the 'hackers' where in the minority for IRC, basically the time where IRC was replacing BBS-es, FIDO and phone/teletext based chat solutions but before ICQ was a thing, and AIM/AOL was never a real thing in western/northern europe Ie, think DALnet and the explosion of minor IRC networks in the 95-98s
- wrycoder 5y agoYeah, I was on irc in the 90’s and missed that one. I had to look it up on urbandictionary, which was entertaining.
- wgjordan 5y agoIn my experience (US mid-90s) this kind of greeting was common in random, mass-consumer chat channels (e.g., on AOL), but nowhere found (or ridiculed as mainstream) on technical/hacker-oriented BBS or IRC channels.
- kragen 5y agoNo, if someone did that on IRC in the 90s we would immediately peg them as a loser from AOL. There was a lot of sex (and sexual harassment) on IRC, but pseudonymity was the default.
- cout 5y agoI encountered the "a/s/l" question on numerous Undernet channels when I started using irc. We would joke about it in programming channels, but people really did use it in non-programming channels.
- novok 5y agoWhen I got the asl question i found it rude and told them i don’t like answering the question. It often had a sexual / dating connotation in my mind, which i didn’t like.
- wearywanderer 5y agoIn my experience the "a/s/l" question has only ever come from people who wanted to have text sex with you, and outside of those sort of chatrooms was only ever said as an awkward joke.