History

IRC stands for "Internet Relay Chat".

IRC was created in the summer of 1988 in Finland, by a man called Jarkko Oikarinen. It was experimented with by people across the country who were interested in developing this new protocol, and more people began to run servers.

ircII was released in 1989 by Michael Sandrof. By mid-1989, IRC had spread across the internet and there were around 40 servers worldwide. During the Gulf War, IRC allowed live communication the likes of which had never been seen before. Families could communicate from across the world, and live reports were sent to channels. IRC had over 300 simultaneous users for the first time.

IRC has continued to grow from this point, with the big networks Dalnet, EFnet, IRCnet, Undernet and indeed QuakeNet, leading this growth. Today IRC has a total count of over a million users, which all spawned from a bedroom programmer in his spare time and people experimenting with his creation.

QuakeNet was founded in 1997 by Garfield and Oli, as an IRC network for Quakeworld players who wanted their own 'haven' from other networks. It quickly attracted players of both this and other games, and had a few hundred users before long. Mag and Madhacker introduced an early version of the service bot 'Q' around this time. Taking a larger timescale into account, many thousands of users flooded to QuakeNet, to make it the (at time of writing) largest IRC network in the world.