Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels,[1] but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages[2] as well as chat and data transfer,[3] including file sharing.[4]
Internet Relay Chat is implemented as an application layer protocol to facilitate communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client–server networking model. Users connect, using a client; which may be a web app, a standalone desktop program, or embedded into part of a larger program; to an IRC server, which may be part of a larger IRC network. Examples of programs used to connect include Mibbit, IRCCloud, KiwiIRC, and MIRC.
IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60 percent of its users.[5] In April 2011, the top 100 IRC networks served more than half a million users at a time.[6]
IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features. The first part he implemented was the chat part, which he did with borrowed parts written by his friends Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl. The first IRC network was running on a single server named tolsun.oulu.fi.[7] Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.[8]
Jyrki Kuoppala pushed Oikarinen to ask Oulu University to free the IRC code so that it also could be run outside of Oulu, and after they finally got it released, Jyrki Kuoppala immediately installed another server. This was the first "IRC network". Oikarinen got some friends at the Helsinki University and Tampere University to start running IRC servers when his number of users increased and other universities soon followed. At this time Oikarinen realized that the rest of the BBS features probably wouldn't fit in his program.[7]
Oikarinen got in touch with people at the University of Denver and Oregon State University. They had their own IRC network running and wanted to connect to the Finnish network. They had obtained the program from one of Oikarinen's friends, Vijay Subramaniam—the first non-Finnish person to use IRC. IRC then grew larger and got used on the entire Finnish national network—FUNET—and then connected to Nordunet, the Scandinavian branch of the Internet. In November 1988, IRC had spread across the Internet and in the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide.[7]
