Originally developed in Finland around 1988, IRC provides synchronous (real time) text-based communication among Internet users. IRC discussions, called chats run the gamut from social commentary to technical discussions.If you are familiar with the AOL chat rooms, IRC is basicly the same thing...only bigger. All "chatting" is done via text messages sent back and forth through the Internet either in public channels that anyone can join or private channels between two conversants.
Example Prarie Home Companion CHAT session
IRC has spawned a totally new form of distributed, socialization, with new network communities that have their own jargon and their own rules of behavior or Chat Etiquette. Because IRC is not a face-to-face or even voice-to-voice communication medium, and because it takes place through computer mediation, it often lessens people's inhibition, especially when peopel can assume any identity or even anonymity as easily as changing their nick. A nick is their nickname or network identity. Many people on IRC register their nick so that they can maintain a persistent identity from one chat session to another.
Recently, variations of IRC have been developed that utilize graphics, such as the Palace and Microsoft Chat. If you downloaded and installed the entire Microsoft Internet Explorer suite of applications, you already have Microsoft Chat. These applications use graphics to provide a contextual background for the channel, and cartoon-like avatars, with facial emote expressions, to represent the conversants. Although these Chat applications provide graphics, the trade-off is a limit o the number of people that can be effectively represented as participating in the conversation.
Although you could use a simple Telnet to chat, you will become frustrated really quick with that method. The better alternative is to use a Chat client, a special program designed to handle chatting. Two good IBM-compatible shareware Chat programs are mIRC or PIRCH. Which you will use is really dependent on personal taste. The download and installation instructions for mIRC can be found here, and a list of mIRC commands can be found here.
Macintosh users can use a shareware program called Ircle 
or MacIRC 
. To see a screen shot of Ircle, click here, and to see a good set of instructions on how to set up Ircle, click here. To see a screen shot of macIRC, click here.
IRC was originally developed on UNIX, and for those real Unix users, there is ircII. It is text only, with no sounds, graphics, or colors, and runs on shell access accounts such as by telnet or terminal emulation programs. Back when most IRC users were from educational sites, ircII was the most popular client. It still sets the gold standard against which other clients are compared, and many people, particularly the die-hard UNIX community still prefer ircII for its simplicity, speed, and power.
There are three major IRC networks on the internet, and numerous small ones. These networks use globally distributed IRC servers on Internet-connected computers to create a world-wide network which allows any conversant to join one of hundreds or even thousands of chat channels. One of the biggest IRC networks is called Efnet (Eris Free net). At any one time it can have upwards of 10,000 to 14,000 people from around the world online with over 7000 separate channels each carrying on a conversation. The next most popular IRC network is probably the Undernet which was setup as an alternative to the overcrowded Efnet servers, but it has since become rather crowded itself. It has an average 6,000 to 11,000 users and around 2,000 to 3,000 channels. The newest global IRC network is DALnet with around 2000 users and 700 or so channels. Each network has its own list of servers. Currently these networks are not connected to each other. If you are on an Undernet server, you cannot talk to someone who is on a DALnet server. The way you can tell the difference between the servers is by the name. All Undernet servers have the words "undernet.org" in the name, and all DALnet servers have the word "DAL" in the name. With the Efnet servers there is a bit of a problem since they don't have anything special in their name so you can't tell the difference between an Efnet server and one of the many IRC servers that are not connected to any of the three major networks.
Once you have connected to an IRC server in one of the three networks with your client, you will need to know some basic IRC commands to navigate and experience the IRC chats. Here are some bsaic commands:
| IRC Tutorials |
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| Windows95 mIRC Tutorials |
| IRCle Tutorials (Macintosh) |
