I don't think hacker-oriented channels or IRC featured this greeting as often as general chat (ICQ/AIM).

There was a time where the 'hackers' where in the minority for IRC, basically the time where IRC was replacing BBS-es, FIDO and phone/teletext based chat solutions but before ICQ was a thing, and AIM/AOL was never a real thing in western/northern europe

Ie, think DALnet and the explosion of minor IRC networks in the 95-98s

Yeah, I was on irc in the 90’s and missed that one. I had to look it up on urbandictionary, which was entertaining.

In my experience (US mid-90s) this kind of greeting was common in random, mass-consumer chat channels (e.g., on AOL), but nowhere found (or ridiculed as mainstream) on technical/hacker-oriented BBS or IRC channels.

No, if someone did that on IRC in the 90s we would immediately peg them as a loser from AOL. There was a lot of sex (and sexual harassment) on IRC, but pseudonymity was the default.

I encountered the "a/s/l" question on numerous Undernet channels when I started using irc.

We would joke about it in programming channels, but people really did use it in non-programming channels.

In my experience the "a/s/l" question has only ever come from people who wanted to have text sex with you, and outside of those sort of chatrooms was only ever said as an awkward joke.

When I got the asl question i found it rude and told them i don’t like answering the question. It often had a sexual / dating connotation in my mind, which i didn’t like.