@amoroso Stack Gopher, Usenet, IRC, Email, on top of that. And, maybe, NNCP as the proxy/relay between all, as you can use text clients from ancient OSes and devices but NNCP -sitting in your LAN- would handle the connections to secure servers.
Bitlbee itself can do TLS for you too, you can use IRC-TLS over a plain IRC client too.