@whitequark✧✦Catherine✦✧ I described IRC to a friend recently as the cockroach of chat protocols.

It's old, it's barely evolved in 30+ years (millennia in computer-years), it's ugly... but it's also impossible to kill and will probably outlive everything else on the planet.

When the asteroid strike or nuclear war or whatever extinction event finally wipes humanity off the planet, the roaches and extremophile bacteria will be IRCing each other via whatever remnants of the internet are still functional.