Setting up and Using an IRC

IRC, the adolescent who never grew up

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. As can be gained/surmised from the name, it has to do something with chatting and has Internet to do with it. All of you who are using are using telegram, whatsapp or any other application on your phone in a group mode (where you talk to many people in real-time) that has either been directly or indirectly influenced by IRC. IRC came in late 80's and before that people used something called Usenet newsgroups which can be seen as a grandfather of the modern mailing list. There were a few one-to-one chat clients but hackers and academicians at the time were not satisfied with the time-lag that newsgroups had and one-to-one chat clients did not just cut it.

So a certain Jarkko Oikarinen, in the summer of 1988 created IRC while being an intern at the University of Oulu in Finland.