We've had IRC and eggdrop (among many other bots) for decades but we've dropped the ball - it's just never been a priority to build nice interfaces on top of these things.
Heck, when I was working with a distributed startup we were using Skype group chat which was actually surprisingly good. Almost Slack good at times. The Skype API was powerful enough to build a bot, but clunky and nowhere as good as the APIs available today. I wrote eggdrop code decades ago and it was fragile and picky.
Heck, when I was working with a distributed startup we were using Skype group chat which was actually surprisingly good. Almost Slack good at times. The Skype API was powerful enough to build a bot, but clunky and nowhere as good as the APIs available today. I wrote eggdrop code decades ago and it was fragile and picky.