IRC Part one: What is IRC?
3 March 2007
For some of you, IRC will be a given as you will have been using it for decades. For some others of you, it will seem completely alien, especially if you are only used to MSN Messenger.
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. It is a useful form of communication, and very mature, being around far longer than the newer one-to-one 'messenger' type programs. Unlike these, IRC has a chat-room concept, where a group can talk together. There are also no animated smileys or fancy graphics of flying monkeys.
IRC started among Finnish students in 1988, it quickly spread on to American Universities and around the world. It started to get prominent when used by Kuwatis and Israelis during the first Gulf War.
> "In the US, you watch television. In Soviet Russia, television watches you!" - Yakov Smirnoff
It became really famous during the dying days of the USSR. President Mikhail Gorbachev set out on his 'Glasnost' policy, meaning that the government would go in for openness and participation, as well as contemplating the idea that the non-Russian parts of the USSR should have more freedom.
In reaction to this, in August 1991, communist hardliners and KGB deposed the president, and held him captive, military surrounded the seats of power. The coup leaders took over the media to contain the news of the coup and present 'business as usual'. IRC was one of the only channels left open, it was used to report news of the coup to Western news agencies and between Russians.
In 1994, there was an LA earthquake; within a few minutes someone had created #earthquake and #quakechat. IRC still worked even when television and phone networks were down.
Perhaps more relevantly, it is used by many Open Source Communities. It is used by users to support each other and answer questions, as well as by developers to communicate about the software they are writing.
We can classify communication according to two factors: time and place; to make it simple we will make the factors binary. The first factor, time, can be synchronous (at the same time) or asynchronous (not at the same time). You also have place, this can be online or the real wet/fleshy world.
So lets take a small community such as a Linux User Group. We can say it has the following forms of communication.
Asynchronous Synchronous
In Person Ad-hoc Coffee etc LUG meeting
On line Mailing List IRC Channel
So in person meetings can be hard to arrange, and someone might need a bit of help where mailing lists are too slow, for example, setting up a piece of complex software. In this case an IRC channel can be useful.
In the next post, I will explain how to get yourself up and running on IRC. Please feel free to share your experiences with IRC using the comments facility below.
1 Mr Stuff says...
There are a lot of excellent IRC channels which are very useful if you need to consult about Linux or some other technological issue. However, IRC is an outdated and insecure medium, if you just want to chat with your friends. MSN sucks too!
What I recommend Mr CLW is Jabber! Please do an article about Jabber soon! It's an open source chat protocol where both the client and server are free, and there are a host of ready and free Jabber servers already out there. It's more reliable than MSN and it's SECURE! You can use GPG to encrypt/decrypt your whole conversation!
Unfortunately there is no way to make IRC secure in this day and age, because of the message size constraints.
Posted at 6:56 p.m. on December 16, 2007