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.