AthenaIRC was created to be a new face on Macintosh Internet Relay Chat. At the time of it's creation all the other IRC clients for Mac had stagnated, no one was innovating. The two leaders in the market, Ircle and Snak, were focused more in the direction of adding everything any user could possible want, rather then what the user really needed. Today, Ircle has bloated to the point that even it's still loyal users have to admit that it is a decaying corpse. Snak, while being a very well rounded client, succeeds by implimenting every bell and whistle a user might want. ShadowIRC, the once strong power client, has fallen to the wayside as a usable port to MacOS X slowely evolved. AthenaIRC was created to show that you didn't need all the cool features to make a decent IRC client, you just needed a consise interface and the flexibility to give users control.
AthenaIRC was the first mainstream client to port to MacOS X. At it's peak AthenaIRC had over 4,000 regular users in OSX alone. In 2002 it won the REALbasic Cubies award for best internet application. TUCOWS.com gave it four stars. It began a revolution in Macintosh IRC, paving the way for new clients such as xChat and iRC. Clients which give you the kitchen counter, but exclude the sink.

Sadly, AthenaIRC eventually met the same fate as the clients it was created to rival. Constant patches to the code to add new features led to a bulk level that could not be worked with. It's like taking a house, and deciding you want to add a window, but you don't want to rebuild the wall, so you just cut a hole in it. Sure, it works, but the wall will never be as strong as it once was. Now do that over and over again, eventually that wall will be so unstable that you can't work with it any longer. AthenaIRC is that wall, and so it is time to rebuild it.