Phillip Tennen, developer of the open-source axleOS, has recently decided to use what he learned from that project to create an IRC client that runs entirely within the UEFI pre-boot environment, with no operating system required. This “UEFIRC” is nearly fully functional, with a graphical interface and a TrueType font renderer, and it’s all written in the Rust programming language.
Wow! It does suggest two things to me:
- IRC is really the lightest weight social chatting app of them all…
- IRC users are a bit different…
Technically I suppose any text based micro-blogging type service could work. Twitter or Mastodon without videos and photos may also work. But the nature of how IRC still works today, means you can get a pretty close experience to the real thing even in the BIOS.