I don’t think I’ve been on IRC since 2006ish. It was the gathering ground for my favorite private torrent tracker at the time. We had Internet radio and all kinds of fun stuff.

Before that, like back in the AOL days, there were chat-based filesharing rooms, where you would get a list of files, then request what whatever illicit goods you wanted via chat.

I’m not really sure what people use IRC for now, but it’s still active.