Ircle

» see ircle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I missed this one on hardware grounds. Through the entire window where Ircle mattered, a Macintosh in Turkey was a thing you saw in a design studio or a magazine, priced past anything a student would consider, and every machine I touched ran Windows and dialed out through a modem. IRC I know. Ircle I only know about.

It starts with Olaf Titz, who wrote it in THINK Pascal and released it in 1993, source included, GPL, up to version 1.56. Then he stopped. Onno Tijdgat took the project over and did the thing that decides whether abandoned software lives, which was to rewrite it properly in C under Metrowerks CodeWarrior and get it running on the new Power Macs. Version 3.0 shipped in 1994 and the license changed with it. Ircle stopped being free software and became shareware, with the promise that upgrades would never cost anything again.

What it was good at was being a real Mac program rather than a terminal wearing a window. It was scriptable in AppleScript, which in the nineties was the closest thing the platform had to plumbing between applications, and it would hold ten simultaneous server connections when most clients assumed you wanted one. For a protocol built entirely out of text, having a client that behaved like the rest of your desktop was the whole reason to pay for it.

The end took a long time and was mostly about processors. In december 2005 Tijdgat announced that work was under way on a build for the Intel Macs Apple had just announced. The universal binary arrived on 21 september 2006, which was late enough that people had already found other clients. The final release was 3.5a6 on 17 november 2007. Development stopped in 2009, and by 2012 the program would no longer run on a current version of OS X.

ircle.com is still there. It is one short paragraph explaining that our rather famous IRC software was discontinued in 2009, under a copyright line that runs to 2023, which means somebody has been renewing a domain for well over a decade to host an apology.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the handover ~

The license change is the interesting part and nobody was angry about it at the time. Titz had put the source under the GPL and then left. Tijdgat rewrote it in a different language, which under the terms of the day made the new thing his, and he charged for it while never charging twice. That arrangement funded sixteen years of maintenance on a program with one developer.

It also set the ceiling. Shareware from a single author cannot absorb a platform transition on somebody else's schedule. Apple tore up the platform underneath its developers twice in a decade and then kept going, and every one of those moves was effectively a rewrite for a program of this shape. Ircle survived the first two and stopped there.

~ the long fade ~

IRC itself did not die, which is what makes this a grave for a client rather than a protocol. The servers Ircle connected to in 1994 have descendants running right now, and someone on a Mac today either runs a terminal client over ssh or opens Discord and never thinks about IRC at all.

What went with Ircle is a category. Paid single-author desktop clients for open protocols were an ordinary business for about fifteen years, and the money in them came from the gap between a protocol being free and a good program being work. That gap closed from both ends. Free clients got good, and the protocols people actually use stopped being open enough for anyone else to write a client for them at all.

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