IRC was simple and light. It went (and still does) under the radar for many. There are channels on IRC that are older than many people here. I'm still on the sa

IRC was simple and light. It went (and still does) under the radar for many. There are channels on IRC that are older than many people here. I'm still on the same channel with my school friends from class of 1999. You could easily see who can see your messages, especially on smaller channels with no lurkers or unknown bots. The only major problem with IRC was that it requires an active TCP connection at all times. So you either had to have your Windows machine with mIRC online all the time or have a shell with either ircII/irssi+screen or a bouncer. Modern-ish solutions like IRCCloud kinda-sorta fix that.