Modder made an IRC client that runs entirely inside the motherboard’s BIOS chip

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:

1. IRC is really the lightest weight social chatting app of them all…
2. 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.

See https://www.tomshardware.com/software/someone-made-a-functioning-irc-client-that-runs-entirely-inside-the-motherboards-uefi