IRC was and still is just fine. Not as flashy as some of the newer stuff it had everything you could ask for in text-based chat.

Well no, it doesn’t keep a history of chats for once. You don’t have a record of conversations if your client wasn’t running at that time. There’s a few other limitations that I’m not familiar with, that prompted many people and orgs to switch to things like rocket chat or matrix

So instead of keeping a record yourself, you pay someone else/use someone else’s computer to do it for you.