Ultimately, with NSFNet expanding in '88 and commercial ISPs emerging in '89, we had more network and computing available than ever—just not on the IBM mainframes hosting Bitnet.

Jarkko Oikarinen took inspiration from Bitnet's Relay and built the Internet Relay Chat (irc) for Unix. It was a little slow to take off, and has had its own drama (with net splits, etc.), but anyone with a Unix system can run their own server—and as a result, some 36+ years later it's still around.

At the 1987 Spring NETCON, Jeff Kell gave a presentation on Relay where he concluded "Relay is on the verge of collapse. […] It is no longer due to network load. It is only marginally due to CPU load. It is due to the users."

The Bitnet Relay software was rebuilt in compiled Pascal, with a binary network protocol that was much more efficient.

So focus turned towards reducing CPU usage. Eric Thomas (who went on to create LISTSERV for automating mailing list signups) got involved and helped make Relay more efficient, converting some core routines from Rexx scripts to assembly.

Of course, the user base just kept growing: by the summer of 1986 we were seeing 150 users, straining systems again. Signup restrictions were added, etc., but the users just kept coming, with a crop of new students joining the chat in the fall.

Through August we started seeing as many as 20 users chatting on relay at the same time. By the end of 1985, we were averaging daily peaks of 50 users or so, sometimes reaching 80.

This started taking up way too much CPU on some of the servers (like Bitnic), so they started shutting it down for days at a time. But while not running a local relay reduced CPU load, it placed more burden on the network again: users didn't stop chatting, they would just find a more distant relay to use.