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Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. It is mainly designed for group (one-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication.
IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen (nickname "WiZ") in late August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox in Finland. Oikarinen found inspiration in Bitnet Relay Chat which operated on the Bitnet network.
IRC gained prominence when it was used behind the Iron Curtain to report on the fall of the USSR during a media blackout. It was later used in a similar fashion by Kuwaitis during the Iraqi invasion.
1 Technical information
IRC is an open protocol that uses TCP and optionally SSL. An IRC server can connect to other IRC servers to expand the IRC network. Users access IRC networks by connecting a client to a server. There are many client and server implementations. Most IRC servers do not require users to log in, but a user will have to set a nickname before being connected.
IRC is a plaintext protocol, which means that it is fully possible (though quite inconvenient) to use IRC via a basic byte-stream client such as netcat or telnet. However, the protocol only uses a slightly modified version of ASCIIASCII A merican S tandard C ode for I nformation I nterchange , generally pronounced 'aski', is a character set and a character encoding based on the Roman alphabet as used in modern English and other Western European languages. It is most commonly used b, and does not originally provide any support for non-ASCII characters in text, with the result that many different, incompatible character encodings (such as ISO 8859-1ISO 8859-1 more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1 is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. 1, consisting of 191 characters from the Latin script, and UTF-8UTF-8 (8- bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a lossless, variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. It uses groups of bytes to represent the Unicode standard for the alphabets of many of the world's languages.) are used.
Because most IRC implementations use an acyclic graph as their connection model, there is no redundancy, and outage of a server or a link can cause a netsplitIn computer networking, specifically Internet Relay Chat, netsplit (sometimes netburp is a term used to describe the disconnection of a given node from the previously established network. Consider the graphic below, which will represent the network. Each.
