PIRCH

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

~ the eulogy ~

In this country the messenger was MSN and it was MSN for practically everyone i knew, so IRC was somewhere i passed through rather than somewhere i lived. when i did go, the client was mIRC, because in Turkey mIRC and IRC were close enough to the same word that people used them interchangeably. PIRCH is a name i only ever read.

Northwest Computer Services published it, and the name is an acronym for PolarGeek's IRC Hack, which tells you roughly what kind of software project it was and roughly which decade produced it. it was shareware, in the era when shareware meant a nag screen and an honest expectation that most people would never pay.

It was good. In 1999 The Book of IRC gave it a chapter and called it the number two Windows IRC client behind mIRC, which in that market was a real position rather than a consolation. really though, it could hold several server connections at once, which mattered when the networks were splitting and you wanted a foot on more than one of them. A 1998 review praised the feature set for beginners and noted that listing channels on a big server was painfully slow.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

PIRCH98 shipped in 1998 and that was the last one. back then, mIRC kept releasing and kept extending its scripting language, and it stayed the thing every tutorial assumed you were running. a client with no updates loses that race without anybody having to beat it in a review.

The gap got obvious enough that people built around it. in fairness, Vortec IRC exists because PIRCH had stopped, and its own about page says so plainly: the lack of software updates was the reason. close enough. when your users start writing a replacement and telling everybody why, the product is already over.

~ the postmortem ~

The Wayback record is unusually clean about this one. the front page at pirchat.com, titled The PIRCH98 Page, carries a copyright line reading 1995-1999 Northwest Computer Services and serves the same two thousand and eighty bytes over and over, capture after capture, from 1999 all the way to 7 february 2003. Identical digest. Nobody touched it for four years.

On 28 july 2003 the same address returns eight hundred and eighty-eight bytes with a title of just pirchat.com, a frameset, and a scrolling status bar advertising a search engine. by january 2004 the title reads PIRCHAT.COM: your niche shopping resource, and the page is a directory of categories running to bar stools and canadian pharmacies. The domain had been let go and picked up.

so the death here has no announcement and no farewell post. Somewhere between february and july 2003 a renewal invoice went unpaid, and that is the entire obituary.

~ what got buried with it ~

What went with PIRCH is the whole shape of the thing: a Windows internet tool made by a very small operation, funded on the honor system, and good enough to hold second place in its category for years. that shape did not survive the decade. The clients that replaced it were open source projects with repositories and maintainers, which is a better arrangement, and also a colder one.

pirchat.com still returns 200 today. back then it was a chapter in a book about IRC. Now it is a domain somebody keeps because the traffic has never entirely stopped, from people typing it in out of a memory of software that has not existed for over twenty years.

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