Was IRC ever used privately and internally within the workplace? I'd like to know if anyone did. I only ever used it briefly with forum communities and some older OSS projects.
At work, it has only ever been Slack. Some older employees recall using Skype for Business.
It's funny, still actively working in the tech space I usually don't really feel my age, but topics like this remind me that I've been around a long time. At one point I think you would have found most large *ix-using organizations running internal IRC servers or even networks. When Slack first came out, it had a first-party IRC bridge, partly for this reason.
IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol, but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a common set of functions that people will always want and any system used for that eventually implements all of them or is replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.
Absolutely. Most big tech companies had, at one point, or still have (Google's is alive and well - how do you talk to your coworkers over Google Meet to troubleshoot why Meet is down when Meet is down?) their own internal IRC server that the sysadmins setup because it was easy enough to stand one up and all the tech people were on IRC anyway, back in the day. IRC predates cloud and the virtual machine proliferation, nevermind Docker.
Yes in Swiss Bank/UBS with logging and other extensions to make it effectively one server across regions. - This was either sold to Microsoft as MindAlign
At work, it has only ever been Slack. Some older employees recall using Skype for Business.