The people who go "into tech" during college because they saw Mark Zuckerberg making dumptrucks full of money probably don't know what IRC is, but the people who had to get into IRC chats to figure out how to make linux work on our hardware (like me, and most of my peers) absolutely grew up with IRC.
I grew up having friends that I met solely on IRC, and having it be a staple of the way that I communicated with certain groups of people; it's the same story with most of the people I hang out with.