IRC
RFC 1459, 1993 · discharged, still contactable
Admitted twice, on the grounds that everyone had moved to something with threads and a mobile client. Removed its own cannula both times.
A museum would be easier. A museum takes things that have stopped. Every protocol on this ward is still answering, still carrying traffic for somebody, and still being described in the present tense by people who have not been told otherwise.
We do not cure. We do not extubate. We keep them comfortable, we write down what they can still do, and we ask that visitors stop saying the word legacy where they can hear it.
Several patients remain capable of work nothing has replaced. Asking them is permitted. Asking them at four in the morning, from a script, forty times a second, is what put two of them in here.
Admission date is the date of first publication. Nothing on this chart is an estimate: a line begins when the protocol was first published and ends when the last public server went dark. Six of them do not end.
Admitted twice, on the grounds that everyone had moved to something with threads and a mobile client. Removed its own cannula both times.
Its largest network changed hands, and within days most of the staff and most of the channels had stood up somewhere else and carried on. That is not the behaviour of a patient. That is the behaviour of a tenant.
If IRC presents again, take a history, offer tea, and do not admit it. It knows where the door is and it has used it under its own power on both previous occasions.
Recorded so that nobody claims they are still an option. A protocol is dead when the last public server is gone and the clients have been removed from the distributions, not when a conference decides it is over.
| Protocol | Cause of death | Ended |
|---|---|---|
| WAIS | Full-text search across the network, five years before the network had anything worth searching. Outlived by its own indexing ideas, which went on to work extremely well elsewhere. | c. 1998 |
| Archie | Indexed the world's anonymous FTP sites by hand-crawling them. Died of the search engine, slowly, over about fifteen years; the last public servers went quiet in the 2010s. | c. 2010s |
| WHOIS | Forty-two years of unparseable free text, formally superseded by RDAP. Registries were required to complete the transition and sunset it. | January 2025 |
| rlogin, rsh, rcp | Trusted the network. The network did not deserve it. Replaced by SSH so completely that a generation has never typed any of the three. | c. 1999 |
SMTP · RFC 821, 1982. Attends daily. Arrives before the shift starts, reads to two of the patients, corrects the staff on the difference between an envelope and a header, and leaves without signing out.
It is four years older than the oldest thing on the ward and it is in excellent health. It has been declared obsolete by at least three successors, all of which it has outlived, and it will almost certainly still be delivering mail on the day this building is sold.