FAQ's
Q ) What is IRC?
A ) IRC, is a virtual dimention where you can meet friends, family or
just people you do not know, no matter where they mite be in the world
.
Q ) Who founded IRC?
A ) Written by Jarkko Oikarinen, founder
of IRC. I don't know if this
helps much. I hope I remember things correctly and apologise people
whom I have left out and they had deserved to be in here. I was working
in the Department of Information Processing Science in University of Oulu
during summer'88. I guess they didn't have much for me to do. I was administring
the department's sun server, but it didn't take all time. So I started
doing a communications program, which was meant to make OuluBox (a Public
Access BBS running on host tolsun.oulu.fi, administered by me) a little
more usable. The purpose was to allow USENET News-kind of discussion and
groups there in addition to real time discussions and other BBS related
stuff. Jyrki Kuoppala (jkp@cs.hut.fi) had implemented rmsg program for
sending messages to people on other machines. It didn't have the channel
concept implemented (though it supported it), so it was mainly used for
person-to-person communications. Another already existing simple multiuser
chat program on OuluBox was MUT (MultiUser Talk),
it was written by Jukka Pihl (pihl@rieska.oulu.fi). That program has a
bad habit of not working properly, so in order to fix this, the first
implemented thing of this BBS plan was IRC. The birthday of IRC was in
August 1988. The exact date is unknown, at the end of the month anyways.
Bitnet Relay Chat was a good inspiration for IRC. When IRC started occasionally
having more than 10 users, I asked some friends of mine to start running
irc servers in south Finland, mainly in Tampere University of Technology
and Helsinki University of Technology. Some other universities soon followed.
Markku
Jarvinen (mta@cc.tut.fi) improved the irc client (there was only one at
that time) to support some emacs editing commands. At that time it was
obvious that adding BBS like functions to the program was not a good idea,
it's better to have one program for one purpose. So the BBS extension
idea was given up and just IRC stayed. IRC was well spread in Finland.
I contacted some friends of mine through BITNET Relay and asked if they
would try this program. Internet connections did not yet work from Finland
to other countries, so they could not connect to the Finnish network (which
I suppose was the reason
for them not being very enthusiastic about irc). Internet connections
to states started working (I don't anymore remember when). I answered
to some news articles where people asked for multiuser chat programs.
I didn't get replies . At mit, there was the legendary ai.ai.mit.edu machine
running ITS. I got an account there and learned to use it a little bit.
Enough to know how to chat with people. From there I got the first IRC
user outside Scandinavia, Mike Jacobs used IRC through OuluBox (he did
not have accounts on any Unix
machines). Through ai.ai.mit.edu I got to know Vijay Subramaniam (I hope
I spelled that correctly :-). I had given IRC to him and not heard of
him for some time. Then I got mail messages from Jeff Trim
(used to be jtrim@orion.cair.du.edu, University of Denver, current address
unknown) David Bleckmann (bleckmd@jacobs.cs.orst.edu) and Todd Ferguson
(melvin@jacobs.cs.orst.edu, Oregon State University). Vijay had given
IRC to them and they had started ircd on their machines (orion.cair.du.edu
and jacobcs.cs.orst.edu, if I remember correctly) and wanted to connect
to Finnish irc network. After that some other people started running IRC,
and the number of servers grew quickly. The
first IRC server (and still running) was tolsun.oulu.fi I have no idea
of the latest one.
Information found at the mIRC web site
Q ) What does IRC stand for?
A ) IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat
Q ) what is a server op?
A ) well a server op is when a server tries to fix things after a net
split . and one thing it needs to fix is to op the nicks that were oped
before the split .
eg. *** h22.eu.undernet.org sets mode: +oo
SimplyRed Vortex^
Q ) What is a bot?
A ) A "bot" is short for "robot". It is normally a script run from a client
or a separate program (in perl, C, and sometimes more obscure languages).
Bots are normally not needed on IRC. A bot generally tries to "protect"
a channel from takeovers. It is important to know that many IRC servers
(especially in the USA) ban ALL bots. Some IRCOps ban domains if you run
a bot on their server (See the segment on K: lines). On IRC you will find
a lot of people with a love/hate attitude towards bots. Some bots do good
work as file- or info-servers. Some will even entertain you with funny
or brain teasing
games. These bots can be useful and desireable. Contrary to these bots,
you will find lots and lots of bots performing useless 'carekeeping' of
channels, harassing and boring people and
sometimes created with the sole purpose to produce garbage. You can imagine
that these bots are disliked by the IRC community. In this context it
is good to advise you to -never- -never- ever take bot code, .ini-files
or strange commands from someone and run it without exactly understanding
what it does. Blind trust is a common mistake among newbies. If you feel
you just -have- to run a bot, at least learn the programming.
At this moment no Windows based bot programs or script handling clients
exist.
Information found at the mIRC web site
More soon ( under construction )
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