Internet Relay Chat
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an Internet chat system. It is designed to allow many people from around the world to have conversations together, but it can also be used to have private one-on-one conversations.
The IRC chat rooms are on servers and they are also called IRC channels. There are small IRC servers (for example, OperaNet) to medium IRC servers (freenode and DalNet, which have about 30k users) and big IRC servers (for example, EFNet, UnderNet, which have overs 100k users).
An IRC client is needed to use IRC. An IRC client is a computer program designed to work with IRC. There are many Java web browser based clients in addition to application based. Opera contains an new, fast easy-to-use IRC client built into the browser. Popular stand-alone clients includes mIRC for Microsoft Windows and X-Chat for *nix.
