Progressive JPEG was a major advance, as one saw a low-resolution image that gradually became higher resolution, had some idea as to the contents of the lower half of the image prior to waiting for half of the data involved to be transferred.

It was just what I used before mIRC, it may very well have been IRC, I just don’t remember what the app was. This would have been in 90-91

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_%28software%29

talk (software)

talk is a Unix text chat program, originally allowing messaging only between the users logged on to one multi-user computer—but later extended to allow chat to users on other systems.

Although largely superseded by IRC and other modern systems, it is still included with most Unix-like systems today, including Linux,[1] BSD systems[2] and macOS.[3]

No Wikipedia page, but there's also PHONE:

https://marc.vos.net/books/vms/help/phone/

Invokes the OpenVMS Phone utility (PHONE). The Phone utility is designed to simulate some of the features of actual telephone communications. You can use the Phone utility to communicate with other users on your system or with any other system connected to your system by DECnet for OpenVMS. To invoke the Phone utility, enter the PHONE command at the DCL prompt and press RETURN.

I've used both on VMS.