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Internet Relay Chat

Often called “the Net's equivalent of CB radio,” Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a real-time chat program accessible via the Internet. People in over 120 countries and territories have used IRC, and one can easily find conversations flourishing in English, German, Japanese, French, Finnish, and other languages there.

From Servers to Networks

According to its creator, Jarkko Oikarinen, “the birthday of IRC was August 1988.” Oikarinen, a network administrator at the University of Oulu, Finland, wanted to expand some of the school's bulletin-board system (BBS) software to include real-time discussions among members. At the time, a program called Talk was already in existence; it enabled two remote computer users to carry on a sentence-by-sentence conversation with one another. Oikarinen's contribution was made when he modified Talk to Chat, which permitted multiple users to join in the conversation.

Although IRC was not the first real-time chat system to be implemented on a large scale (the U.S. military had been using one for some time), it was the first to be available to ordinary users. Oikarinen had intended to implement his chat program only on his own server, tolsun.oulu.fi. Soon, however, friends at Helsinki University and Tampere University began running chat servers connected to Oikarinen's over the Internet. IRC was entirely a Finnish affair until servers at the University of Denver and Oregon State University connected as well. By the middle of 1989, IRC had spread across the Internet, with 40 servers worldwide.

In the beginning of IRC's popularity, all servers were connected to one another. But in August 1990, IRC users began complaining about one specific server, eris.berkeley.edu, which had particularly lax security. In protest, a group of servers formed the first IRC “Net,” EFNet, which stood for “Eris Free network.” Today, there are hundreds of independent IRC networks, but the “Big Four” are EFNet, UnderNet, DALnet, and IRCnet. Researcher Daniel Stenberg has discovered what he calls an “increasing regionalization” of the global networks. For example, IRCnet users are generally European, he notes, whereas EFNet users are generally from the Americas and Australia. In addition, there exist a number of regional IRC networks, such as BrasNet for Brazilian users.

Relays and Channels

As IRC expert Alexander Charalabidis explains, “The keyword in IRC is ‘relay.’” In its simplest form, IRC consists of two programs: a server program that accepts connections, and a client program that connects to a server. The most popular client for connecting to IRC these days is MIRC freeware for Windows, although Java-based interfaces now permit users to join IRC chats via the Web as well. Once connected to an IRC server, users join conversation spaces called channels, whose names are designated by the # sign. Channels can be public or private, moderated or unmoderated, and conversational topics generally range from the profound to the banal to the “wild and wooly.” It is not uncommon for one IRC server to have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of chat channels open simultaneously, and experienced users often find themselves juggling multiple channels at a time.

Perhaps the most famous IRC channel is known as #report, devoted to breaking news stories. Particularly in crises, #report provides real-time communication among people worldwide, without the filters of mass media. The #report channel gained its reputation during the 1991 Gulf War, and then again during the coup attempt against Boris Yeltsin, when IRC users in Moscow typed in live reports of what they were witnessing. On September 11, 2001, IRC was used once again by those trying to get information regarding the state of New York City and Washington, D.C., after the terrorist attacks.

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