What is Internet Relay Chat (IRC)?
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an online medium for the transfer of text and files. A common protocol run on many servers and accessed by many different types of clients, IRC allows anyone with a server to set up their own chat rooms and invite others to join in. Because the protocol is not proprietary, IRC is a powerful way of decentralizing chat rooms and providing users with ad-free, clean interface-based chatting. IRC is generally credited with being responsible for the origin of the modern Internet chat movement. The most widely used chat system on Earth, IRC was developed by a European grad student, Jarkko Oikarinen, at the University of Oulu, Finland. Working at the Department of Information Processing Science in the summer of 1988, Oikarinen was inspired by Jyrki Kuoppala’s “rmsg” program and another system called Bitnet Relay Chat. Bootstrapping off a multi-user chat program called MultiUser Talk (MUT), Oikarinen released IRC in August 1988, and it quickly spread across Finland
Everyone knows about the chat rooms. IRC is more like a chat central. How’s this for a chat room: You type in your own comments, other people type in their comments. You can see their comments immediately, and they can see yours. Type as much as you want, or sit back and watch all the people talking about stuff. Most IRC servers will let you create a room with any kind of name. Or you can join any room in progress. Most chat servers have hundreds of rooms, and even more users. We can recommend some IRC chat programs to use. Windows 95/NT people can use a program called mIRC (507 kb). We’re taking suggestions for Macintosh IRC clients. Your Service provider might not have an IRC client available for you to use, so you might have to do some searching. America Online, Netcom, as well as many of the other major online services have their own IRC servers. Contact your customer support to get an IRC server you can use.
