|
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an instant form of online communication and is mainly intended for the usage of group communication in message boards or Blogs, although, it facilitates one-to-one communication too.
Created by Jarkko Oikarinen, in late August, 1988, IRC was produced with the intention of replacing MUT (MultiUser talk), a program on a BBS in Finland .
But it was with its use of reporting on the Soviet coup attempt of 1991, throughout a media blackout, that IRC gained its prominence, although it had already been used before, in a similar fashion, during the Iraqi invasion, by Kuwaitis.
|
Technical information
IRC makes use of TCP and optionally SSL protocols. To expand the IRC network, an IRC server can connect to other IRC servers. Most IRC servers require you to set a nickname before connecting, instead of logging in.
It is optionally possible to use IRC via a basic byte-stream client, such as netcat or telnet. However, the protocol does not originally provide any support for non-ASCII characters in text, but only uses a slightly modified version of ASCII.
There is no redundancy in most IRC implementations, because they use an acyclic graph as their connection model, and outage of a server or a link can cause a netsplit.
Accepted nets. At greater than ten thousand
users each, these nets add to a greater part of IRC users (about
2/3). Inclined to be beleaguered by cover, splits, spam and common
idiocy, but for a good number people, nets like these are 'the
position to be' for discover people, illegitimate files, etc.
|
