12.04.2024
2 min
1288
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is one of the oldest online communication protocols, laying the foundation for modern chat systems and digital communities. It emerged in the late 1980s and quickly became a global tool for real-time communication. Despite its age, IRC is still used today as a stable, decentralized platform for technical and professional communities. The history of this protocol helps explain how the internet evolved into the form we know today.
IRC appeared in the summer of 1988, when Finnish programmer Jarkko “WiZ” Oikarinen wrote the first Internet Relay Chat client and server at the University of Oulu, where he worked in the Department of Information Sciences.
Oikarinen initially planned to expand the BBS software he administered on the tolsun.oulu.fi server. The idea was to add Usenet-style news, real-time discussions, and other features typical of BBS. The first component to be implemented was chat. It was based on code fragments borrowed from Jarkko’s friends, Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl.
The first tests were conducted on a single machine. According to Oikarinen’s own recollections, “IRC’s birthday was in August 1988, although the exact date is not remembered, but it was definitely at the end of the month.” The first IRC server was called tolsun.oulu.fi.
It was Jyrki Kuoppala who convinced Oikarinen to ask the University of Oulu to open access to the IRC code so that it could be used outside Oulu. After the code was published, Kuoppala immediately set up his own server, which was later named irc.cs.hut.fi. This is how the first IRC network came into being.
During the same period, Ari Lemmke joined the IRC development team. He recalled that he was in the same room when ircd was being installed and decided to explore the tolsun server. Taking advantage of a vulnerability in sendmail, he gained access to the system. At that time, such experiments were typical for the academic environment.
With the growth in the number of users, Oikarinen approached his colleagues at the universities of Helsinki and Tampere with a proposal to launch their own IRC servers. Other educational institutions soon joined them. Markku Järvinen made an important contribution to the development of the client. It was then that it became clear that the full implementation of all BBS functions within IRC was unlikely.
At the same time, contacts were established with the University of Denver and Oregon State University. They already had their own IRC network, the software for which was obtained from Vijay Subramaniam, the first non-Finnish person to start using IRC. American servers sought to connect to the Finnish network.
IRC subsequently spread to the entire Finnish national network Funet and was later connected to Nordunet, the Scandinavian segment of the Internet. By November 1988, IRC was already operating on the global network.
By mid-1989, there were about 40 IRC servers worldwide. That same year, Michael Sandrof released the ircII client, which quickly became one of the most popular.
In July 1990, the average number of IRC users was approximately 12 people on 38 servers. That same year, a separate network was created to develop a new version of the ircd 2.6 server. It was called ChNet and consisted of about 25 servers, but in fact had no users. After a few months, internal conflicts between developers led to its collapse.
In August 1990, the first serious conflict occurred in IRC. The A-net network, also known as Anarchy Net, included a server called eris.berkeley.edu. It was completely open, required no passwords, and had no limits on the number of connections. As Greg “wumpus” Lindahl explained, the server used wildcard server lines, which caused users to connect to servers and encounter already occupied nicknames.
In response, the “free Eris network,” which later became known as EFnet, made eris the first server to be separated from IRC using a Q-line, where Q stood for quarantine. According to Lindahl, eris refused to remove this line, which led to the creation of EFnet. This did not turn into an open conflict, as all major hubs were convinced to join, and most other servers eventually followed. As a result, A-net consisted of eris servers, while EFnet brought together all the others. Over time, most servers and users moved to EFnet. The name EFnet itself did not last long, and after the disappearance of A-net it also lost its original relevance. For a period of time, there was once again only a single IRC.
The next network to split off was TubNet. It was created by a group of users from the #hottub channel who had grown tired of constant network splits. The network consisted of five servers and around one hundred users, but it ceased to exist by September of the same year.
One of the most frequently mentioned events in IRC history was the Gulf War. In early 1991, real-time reports became available, and for the first time more than 300 users were recorded as being connected simultaneously.
Another fork, the first one that truly had major and long-term significance, appeared in October 1992 in the United States. It was initiated by a user known as Wildthang, who created a fork of EFnet ircd version 2.8.10. Initially, it was intended to be a test network for bot development, but it very quickly turned into a closed network “for friends and friends of friends.”
At the same time, users known as _dl and WIZZARD were working on a separate new network in Europe and Canada. In December, French servers connected to Canadian ones, and by the end of the month the .fr-.ca network was linked to the American network. This is how the network that later became known as Undernet was formed.
Undernet aimed to further develop ircd, particularly by reducing bandwidth usage and attempting to bring order to the growing chaos of channels. These issues had begun to seriously affect EFnet, especially network splits and channel takeovers. To address this, Undernet introduced timestamps, a new routing system, and CService. This was a program that allowed users to register channels and attempted to protect them from abuse, effectively acting as a global protective bot.
The first published server list, dated February 15, 1993, included servers from the United States, Canada, France, Croatia, and Japan. On August 15, a new user record was recorded, reaching 57 simultaneous connections.
In May 1993, Request for Comments 1459 describing the IRC protocol was released to the public. Since then, it has undergone numerous deviations and extensions. Notably, parts of CTCP, as well as features such as colors and text formatting, were not included in the protocol specification. Character encoding was also left undefined.
In the summer of 1994, according to some sources in July, the Undernet network split once again. This time, the new network was named Dalnet, after its founder dalvenjah. It was created with the goal of improving user service and strengthening protection for both users and channels.
One of Dalnet’s key differences from the very beginning was the use of longer nicknames. The original IRCD limit was nine characters, and Dalnet was among the first to actively move away from this restriction. Modifications to the Dalnet IRCD were carried out by Alexey “Lefler” Kosut.
Dalnet was based on the Undernet ircd server, although the founders of the new network had previously been involved with EFnet. According to James Ng, the initial core of Dalnet consisted of operators from the #StarTrek channel who had grown tired of constant network splits, lag, channel takeovers, and related issues.
Dalnet quickly introduced a number of new features. These included global WallOps, meaning messages from IRC operators visible to users with the +w mode enabled, longer nicknames, Q-lined nicknames that could not be used by regular users, global K-lines to ban individual users or entire domains, the GlobOps channel for communication exclusively among IRC operators, and the +H mode indicating that an operator was acting as a helpop.
Many of these features were implemented in early 1995 by Brian “Morpher” Smith. They allowed users to register their own nicknames and channels, send notes, and use services that had previously not existed in IRC.
In March 1996, Undernet split once again. The cause was the disconnection of the only Australian server, which was unable to operate reliably due to problems with the trans-Pacific Australian–American network connection. During its first few months, the oz.org network was essentially a forced test separation from Undernet, as maintaining a stable connection during peak usage hours proved impossible.
One of the two developers of Undernet’s original channel services X and W, known by the nicknames chaos and seks, was Australian. The same codebase was later used for the Z service, which became the channel service of oz.org. By June 2001, the oz.org network had reached a peak of approximately 4,000 simultaneous users.
In July 1996, after several months of intense disputes and conflicts on the mailing list, another major split occurred. The cause was a disagreement over how IRCd development should proceed. The so-called European side, with most of its servers located in Europe, supported the use of nickname and channel delays. The EFnet side, by contrast, favored a timestamp-based model.
As a result, a new network was formed and named IRCnet. Most of its servers were located in Europe, while the majority of EFnet servers remained in the United States. This event became known as the “Great Split” and is still referenced within IRC communities.
Afterward, EFnet continued to grow and by August 1998 had surpassed its previous user count. By autumn 2000, EFnet had around 50,000 users, while IRCnet had approximately 70,000 users.
Another IRC network that emerged in 1998 was called the Open Projects Network. At the beginning, it was quite small, with around 100 users and fewer than 20 channels. By the end of 2001, the network had grown significantly, reaching nearly 4,000 users and more than 1,300 channels.
In its early years, the Open Projects Network used the ircu server, later switching to the Dancer IRCD server. The network was eventually renamed Freenode.
In 2011, Freenode reached a peak of approximately 65,000 users across about 40,000 channels. By 2021, the number of users had grown to around 90,000.
In May 2021, a mass departure of administrators from Freenode took place following disagreements with the owner of parts of the infrastructure. Many of these administrators moved to the newly created libera.chat network. A large number of channels that had previously been hosted on Freenode also migrated to libera.
As the internet evolved, so did IRC. Today, there are hundreds of independent IRC networks, including amiganet, linuxnet, galaxynet, bestnet, NewNet, AnotherNet, ChatNet, UpperNet, ZAnet, X-Net, GammaNet, SuperChat, IceNet, RedBrasil, GR-Net, AlphaStar, SorceryNet, and many others. However, there have traditionally been only a small number of major networks. In 1998, the reality was that there were four main ones, each continuing to develop its own version of IRCD server software.
By 2002, many additional networks had appeared, and today a large number of them develop their own customized versions of the IRC protocol.
IETF-IRCUP was a project launched in January 1998. Its goal was to collect all existing variants of IRC servers, document them, and prepare a new RFC, and, if possible, define a single standard for all IRC networks. The initiative was short-lived and was eventually discontinued without achieving its objectives.
CTCP/2 was a separate attempt to standardize client-to-client interaction in IRC. The project was started in 1997 by Björn Reese and aimed to create an updated CTCP protocol, which was never included in any RFC. The core problem was that IRC clients had extended and modified the original CTCP for years, making new codes incompatible with older clients. CTCP/2 sought to define rules for introducing new codes in a way that would keep older clients functional. Particular attention was also intended to address IPv6-related issues, especially those affecting the DCC initialization sequence. Like the previous initiative, the CTCP/2 project was eventually abandoned.
IRCv3 took a more pragmatic approach to protocol development. It is a working group of IRC client developers and network operators focused on creating extensions to the IRC client protocol without attempting to impose a radical standard across the entire ecosystem. Development proceeds gradually, through compatible extensions that can be adopted independently.
What the future holds for IRC remains to be seen.
According to measurements conducted by irc.netsplit.de, IRC has been gradually losing users overall since around 2004–2005. During that period, the four leading IRC networks each had more than 100,000 daily users. These networks were QuakeNet, Undernet, IRCnet, and EFnet. QuakeNet was the largest, with more than 200,000 users.
By early 2011, QuakeNet had just over 100,000 users and was the only IRC network with more than one hundred thousand users.
In 2021, Freenode, before its decline, was the largest network, reaching a peak of around 90,000 users in February.
IRC was more than a chat system. It introduced many of the core ideas of online communication, such as nicknames, channels, moderation, and community self-governance. These concepts later shaped modern messaging platforms.
Conflicts, network splits, and technical debates were a normal part of IRC’s evolution. Through them, different approaches to security, control, and collaboration emerged. Even as its popularity declined, IRC did not disappear and remains in use where openness and simplicity matter.
IRC taught the internet how to talk in real time. Its influence may be quieter today, but modern online communication would not exist in the same form without it.
Памятаю вікторини в Ірці, було круто))