IRC or Instant Relay Chat was the original versions of MSN. It was a feature on Windows that used the idea of ‘real-time’ chat. It was most commonly used in the 1990’s but its creation began in 1988 when it was written by Jarkko Oikarinen from Finland (Internet Relay Chat History, 2011). It was used as a means to communicate and work with others over the computer. Ideally, it was the cheaper method of communicating with people out of the country. To use the system you have to download a ‘client’ program which would then connect you to a server in the IRC network which would then patch you through to others on the same server (mIRC co, 1995-2011). IRC has chat rooms are called channels. You can join a specific ‘channel’, which sounds like they would have been used a bit like a forum.
I can’t seem to find a way to tell the number of people on IRC when it was at its peak, mostly because people aren’t required to create an account to use the server. I did, however, find that there were 60 925 users on the servers today which is...19.08.2011, (IRC Networks – top 100, 1998-2011). Honestly IRC faded into the background because of its hacker problem (apparently they like to attack it for some reason) and its dodgy users. Also who would want to use it when we have the fast, at our finger-tips MSN? In a way though it probably paved the way for our once beloved MSN, although, that too, probably paved the way for Facebook chats.
http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_irc.htm, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) History, 1996-2011, William Stewart
http://www.mirc.com.au/about.html, About mIRC, 1995-2011
http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top100.php, 1998-2011.
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