My experience with IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

What is IRC and its history

IRC is an abbreviation for Internet Relay Chat. It is a network-based multi-user, multi-channel chat system and requires the usage of a client to connect to a server, which relays messages to all other participants in the chat.

IRC itself was developed in summer 1988 by Jarkko "WiZ" Oikarinen, who wrote the first client and server for it, at the University of Oulu in Finland. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administrated at tolsun.oulu.fi. He wanted to add usenet style news,real time discussions and similar BBS features. While implementing the first part, the chat, he borrowed parts of code from his friends Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl. Later on Jyrki Kuoppala pushed Jarkko to ask Oulu University to free the IRC code, so it could be ran outside of Oulu. As time went on IRC was getting more popular. Servers were not only hosted in Finland, but also in different countries. In November 1988, IRC had spread across the Internet and in mid-1989 there were around 40 servers around the world.

IRC reached its peak around year 2004/2005 with top 4 IRC networks having 100K users on a daily basis and ever since that time IRC networks have gradually lost its users.
 

My experience with IRC

I have known about IRC for a very long time. Long before ever using it, I had always heard it being mentioned online. The first time I had ever used it was around 4/5 years ago, when I just got into linux and unix-like operating systems. I wanted to connect to like-minded people who used the same linux distribution as me. Most open-source projects go with IRC for communication and I decided to give it a try.

I downloaded a client and connected to freenode. I joined my distribution's channel and was amazed to see it being so active. If I remember correctly, then there were around 400 people connected and many of them were talking about changes to packaging packages.

At some point my interest in keeping up to date with the distribution died out and I found another interesting place. It was on the IRCnet network and the channel was #linux.ee. People mostly idle'd there and rarely talked, but sometimes people did and it was fun. The conversation was mostly off-topic, and there was one guy who continuously reminded everyone to stay on subject, but another who always made excuses.

At some point I got bored of IRC, because I didn't know anyone there personally. I was just idle'ing there and saying something once in a while.

The things I really liked about IRC was that it was so basic. It was just text and that means no embedded pictures, which take a lot of space and most of time don't add anything to the talk. It also had no accounts. All you had to do was connect with the nickname you wanted, connect to the network, join the channel and you were good to go.I will definitely come back to IRC at some point in the future.

Sources

https://www.csun.edu/~webteach/mirc/whatis.html

https://daniel.haxx.se/irchistory.html

https://history-computer.com/irc-guide/

https://hackaday.com/2021/05/20/freenode-debacle-prompts-staff-exodus-new-network/


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