[abstractbeliefs]

It's not so funny, because this article was written at the time freenode was burning to the ground, and the article suggests that it would be very easy for everyone to move to libera if it turned out to be the better option.

And that it worked so well is the point of the article!

IRC is highly resilient because it's simple to set up, the clients and servers are free software and can be endlessly and independently configured to talk to each other, and it's light on resources - both server, client, and bandwidth.

I'm on terrible, legacy satellite internet (ie, not starlink, with 700ms-1.2s round trip times), and IRC is the only chat system that works fine.

[RiverCrochet]

IRC is so lightweight that a single-core sub 500MHz system can host 10,000 or more connections, and did back in the day.

[FireBeyond]

Hah, the general issue with IRC was (even without DDoS) the bandwidth.

I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country:

At the time, Australia's internet capacity overseas was a SINGLE 1.5Mbit link. Telstra did buy a 45Mbit link in late 1995, and then another in early 1996.

Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.

I remember working for a web design company in the mid-late 90s and we had servers at a datacenter in Melbourne. I remember downloading Netscape Navigator (1.1n!) and being blown away by how fast it downloaded, and then realizing for the duration of the download I was using something in the order of 5% of the country's international bandwidth.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia

[grogenaut]

In the fall of 96 or 97? I was getting some freshmen setup with computers. I was on the football team so we were on campus (WUSTL) 7 days before school started so almost no one was on campus. We were trying to download navigator from tucows (I think) and I remembered wuarchive still existed and was on campus. We had 100 meg in the buildings and fiber backbone. We pulled NN at 5.5Mb/s... it finished so fast we downloaded it a second time to make sure. And I said "We won't see speeds like that for 7-10 years." I was pretty correct. That's when I realized that live video would be doable but not for a while.

[Dalewyn]

>Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.

It's easy to take for granted just how much Fucking God Damn Technology we have mundane access to today.

That 14700K or 7800X3D CPU? That's more powerful than entire national supercomputers back in the day.

A 64 gigabyte stick of DDR5 RAM? Bill Gates once said 640 kilobytes is enough for everyone. And you probably needed multiple sticks.

A 20TB hard drive? With helium? Do you understand the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives barreling down the freeway in the 1980s?! Wait, nobody probably even knows what a station wagon is anymore...

1gbit/s internet? 10gbit/s ethernet? We sung the melody of dial up modems conducting international diplomacy better than any politicians.

360Hz liquid crystal display monitor with billions of colors and millions of pixels? We used to completely evacuate air out of glass or ceramic tubes and fire fucking lasers with them to show monotone pictures in neon orange or green.

Modern, minimalist user interfaces? To hell with them, Windows 95 was the pinnacle of human engineered interface design.

...Wait, did we actually devolve? Maybe it was a mistake to make sand think after all.

[chuckadams]

> Bill Gates once said 640 kilobytes is enough for everyone.

Gates has always denied saying this, and no one has ever produced the original quote. It’s more like something IBM would have said about the PC, they’re the ones that created that limit.

[Clamchop]

Not lasers, but something even better. Randall Munroe once described CRTs as "desktop particle accelerators".

[baruch]

And here we are working on systems with dual 400Gbps and sending data out of storage clusters at 5 TiB/s.

[kjs3]

Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.

It's not 'insane'. Bandwidth goes a long way when you aren't downloading 100Mb JS frameworks and watching cat videos all day.

[Borg3]

Remember Twisted.Dal.Net server? :) Admin of it did some magikery on his server and hosted 50k local clients!! :) And it was 2001 or so... Thats crazy :)

[wkat4242]

Oops, when I saw how old the article was I just skimmed it.

But yeah it worked out really well with Libera.