I can remember before there were computers on every desktop. I can remember when computers were only in a few places in the country and none were connected. They surely were not used for typing or publishing. Back then, we used manual typewriters (I still have mine); if you were very lucky, you had access to an electric typewriter. We did not have italics back then. Underline was used for italics in everything except typeset material (galleys, proofs, etc.). (I do remember when the IBM Selectric came out with an italic ball - easy to switch out to italicize the words you wanted and then switch back to a normal typeface.)
If you wanted to indicate a publication name or a book title in your text, you hit the backspace key until you got to the begining of the word...then you hit the underscore key till you got to the end of the word. If your ribbon was running low, sometimes this required you to do this several times before the entire underline showed up correctly.
If you wanted to emphasize something with bold, you backspaced to the beginning of the word and typed the word again...harder, repeating until you got a bold word. There were even some typewriters that would let you offset your carriage by a very small amount to type the next version of the word slightly to one side of the letters you just typed.
Italics have replaced underline in some of the major publication styles, but only fairly recently. I still have my old Turabian that specifies only underline. Turabian (University of Chicago Press) was the publication standard until the APA (3rd ed.) got popular in 1983; MLA really didn't catch on until later, around 1988.
Personally, I belive italics would be a nice addition. In some fonts, it works well. I will not lose sleep over it if italics never makes it into mIRC. It's just another way to set off text as being more emphasized, and I already have -=> LOTS <=- of ways to do *that* already without even resorting to bold/underline/reverse/color/italics/flash/xml/whatever. I don't personally see any reason why $chr(23) might not be used (or any of the other unused non-printing characters) for italics.
Will that be an addition to "the protocol"? You bet. Will those UNIX uber-geeks still complain about it? Don't they always complain if you're not them? (In fact, I'd like to see mIRC use BEL for that just to piss them off! <EG> I'd have to italicize every letter of every word - get their console ringing like a church bellfry at a wedding.)
