It's funny, still actively working in the tech space I usually don't really feel my age, but topics like this remind me that I've been around a long time. At one point I think you would have found most large *ix-using organizations running internal IRC servers or even networks. When Slack first came out, it had a first-party IRC bridge, partly for this reason.
IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol, but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a common set of functions that people will always want and any system used for that eventually implements all of them or is replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.
IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol, but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a common set of functions that people will always want and any system used for that eventually implements all of them or is replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.