floattube I was always more of an IRC person back in the day, but I think a big difference then was that there was no real chat persistance. Of course people would keep chat logs sometimes, but they'd be a rather roundabout way of finding old information. Services like Discord where you can easily find and link/reply to past messages tend to blur the line somewhat, often making forums obsolete, while at the same time being more difficult than forums to keep up with.
With stuff like IRC, forums were still active, as the two sorta went hand-in-hand. IRC for general real-time chit chat, forums for talking about more in-depth stuff.
