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Author: Daniel Stenberg
Version: 0.10 - March 29, 2011
History of IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
I've done my very best to gather information from as many sources as
possible to verify facts, stories and dates. If you have additional
information, have found errors in my text or just feel like
commenting anything, email me! I find collecting historical facts
about internet events really hard.
Feel free to link to this page or host it elsewhere. Please keep me
credited as author.
Other stories about the IRC history.
The Beginning
IRC was born during summer 1988 when Jarkko "WiZ" Oikarinen wrote the
first IRC client and server at the University of Oulu, Finland (where
he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science).
Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administrated at
tolsun.oulu.fi, to allow news the usenet style, real time discussions
and similar BBS features. The first part he implemented was the chat
part, which he did with borrowed parts written by his friends Jyrki
Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl. It was initially tested on a single machine,
and according to the words from Jarkko himself "The birthday of IRC
was in August 1988. The exact date is unknown, at the end of the
month anyways.". The first IRC server was named tolsun.oulu.fi.
Jyrki Kuoppala pushed Jarkko to ask Oulu University to free the IRC
code so that it also could be run outside of Oulu, and after they
finally got it released, Jyrki Kuoppala immediately installed a
server (which later became irc.cs.hut.fi). This was the first "irc
network".
Ari Lemmke's own words: "At the same time Jyrki installed ircd, I was
at the same room and had nothing to do, so I decided to crack into
tolsun (the irc server Sun machine at Oulu), and naturally ;-) got in
through a new hole in sendmail. (At that time Jyrki was still the
best cracker I knew...)"
Jarkko got some friends at the Helsinki and Tampere Universities to
start running IRC servers when his number of users increased.
Other universities soon followed. Markku Jarvinen helped improving
the client. At this time Jarkko realized that the rest of the BBS
features probably wouldn't fit in his program!
Jarkko got in touch with guys at the University of Denver and Oregon
State University. They had got an IRC network running (they had got
the program from one of Jarkko's friends, Vijay Subramaniam -- the
first non-finnish person to use IRC) and wanted to connect to the
finnish network. IRC then grew larger and got used on the entire
Finnish national network - Funet - and then connected to Nordunet,
the Scandinavian branch of the Internet. In November 1988, IRC had
spread across the Internet.
In the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide.
ircII was released 1989 by Michael Sandrof.
In July 1990, IRC averaged at 12 users on 38 servers.
In 1990, a new network was set up in order to develop a new version
(2.6) of the ircd. The network named ChNet (about 25 servers and no
users) existed a few months before disagreements among the
programmers caused it to dissolve.
EFnet
In August 1990 the first major disagreement took place in the IRC
world. The "A-net" (Anarchy net) included as server named
eris.berkeley.edu. It was all open, required no passwords and had no
limit on the number of connects. As Greg "wumpus" Lindahl explains:
"it had a wildcard server line, so people were hooking up servers and
nick-colliding everyone".
The "Eris Free network", EFnet, made the eris machine the first to be
Q-lined (Q for quarantine) from IRC (wumpus' words again: "Eris
refused to remove that line, so I formed EFnet. It wasn't much of a
fight; I got all the hubs to join, and almost everyone else got
carried along."). A-net was formed with the eris servers, EFnet was
formed with the non-eris servers. History showed most servers and
users went with EFnet. The name EFnet lived only shortly, as soon as
ANet had died, the name EFnet became void too. There was one and only
IRC left again.
TubNet was the next network to splinter off. It was created by a
crowd of people in #hottub that grew tired of all the netsplits. It
got 5 servers and around 100 users. It died again in September the
same year.
One often-talked-about event in the history of IRC is the gulf war.
In early 1991, live reports were available and more than 300
concurrent users were experienced for the first time.
Undernet
Another fork effort, the first that really made a big and lasting
difference, was initiated by 'Wildthang' in USA October 1992 (it
forked off the EFnet ircd version 2.8.10). It was meant to be just a
test network to develop bots on but it quickly grew to a network "for
friends and their friends". In Europe and Canada a separate new
network was being worked on (by '_dl' and 'WIZZARD') and in December
the french servers connected to the canadian ones, and in the end of
the month, the .fr-.ca network was connected to the US one and the
network that later came to be called "The Undernet" was born.
The "undernetters" wanted to take ircd further in an attempt to make
it less bandwidth consumptive and to try to sort out the channel
chaos (netsplits and takeovers) that EFnet started to suffer from.
For the latter purpose, the Undernet implemented timestamps, new
routing and offered the CService -- a program that allowed users to
register channels and then attempted to protect them from
troublemakers. (More or less a global defense bot.) The very first
server list presented, from Febrary 15th 1993, includes servers from
USA, Canada, France, Kroatia and Japan. On August 15th, the new user
count record was set to 57 users.
RFC
In May 1993, the Request For Comments 1459, for the IRC protocol is
out for the public. It has since been subject to many violations and
extensions.
It is notable that the CTCP parts and things like colors and formats
are not included in the protocol spec. Nor is character encoding.
Dalnet
During the summer (some sources mention July) 1994, the Undernet is
itself forked. This time, the new Network is called Dalnet (named
after its founder: dalvenjah), and they formed the new network for
better user service and even more user and channel protections. One
of the more significant changes in Dalnet already from the beginning
is their use of longer nicknames (the original ircd limit being 9
letters). Dalnet ircd modifications were made by Alexei "Lefler"
Kosut.
Dalnet was thus based on the undernet ircd server, although the
dalnet pioneers were EFnet abandoners. According to James Ng the
initial dalnet people were "ops in #StarTrek sick from the constant
splits/lags/takeovers/etc".
Dalnet quickly offered global WallOps (IRCop messages that can be
seen by users who are +w (/mode NickName +w)), longer nicknames,
Q:Lined nicknames (nicknames that cannot be used i.e. ChanServ,
IRCop, NickServ, etc.), global K:Lines (ban of one person or an
entire domain from a server or the entire network), IRCop only
communications: GlobOps, +H mode showing that an IRCop is a "helpop"
etc.
Much of Dalnet's new functions were written in early 1995 by Brian
"Morpher" Smith and allow users to own nicknames, channels, send
memos and more.
oz.org
Undernet split (again) in March 1996 when the sole Australian server
delinked from Undernet because of difficulties with the connection
across the TransPacific Australian/United States network link. The
first few months of oz.org's existance were primarily a trial delink
from the Undernet because of the inability to maintain a link during
peak usage hours. One of the two designers (chaos and seks) of the
orginal Undernet X and W chanserv was Australian, and the same code
was used for Oz.org's Z (the name of the chanserv). In June 2001,
ozorg boasted peak usages of 4,000 simultaneous users.
IRCnet
In July 1996, after months of flame wars and discussions on the
mailing list, there was yet another split due to disagreement in how
the development of the ircd should evolve. Most notably, the
"european" (most of those servers were in europe) side that later
named itself IRCnet argued for nick and channel delays, where the
EFnet side argued for timestamps. Most (not all) of the IRCnet
servers were in Europe, while most of the EFnet server were in the
US. This event is also known as "The Great Split" in many IRC
societies. EFnet has since (as of August 1998) grown and passed the
number of users it had then. In the autumn year 2000, EFnet has some
50,000 users and IRCnet 70,000.
Freenode - Open Projects Network
Yet another IRC network that opened its doors in 1998 named the Open
Projects Network, and had about 100 users and less than 20 channels
that year. In late 2001 it had grown to nearly 4,000 users and over
1,300 channels. The OPN uses the Dancer IRCD server, after having
been using ircu the intial few years.
This network was later renamed to Freenode.
In 2011, it peaks at 65,000 users in 40,000 channels.
Other Networks
Of course, while internet is booming so does IRC. There exists
hundreds of independent IRC networks today (like amiganet, linuxnet,
galaxynet, bestnet, NewNet, AnotherNet, ChatNet, UpperNet, ZAnet,
X-Net, GammaNet, SuperChat, IceNet, RedBrasil, GR-Net, AlphaStar,
SorceryNet etc), but luckily there is "only" four of the main ones
(this was the reality back in 1998) that keep develop their own
version of the ircd server software.
Of course, as of 2002, lots of other networks have popped up and now
numerous of them are developing their own customized versions of the
IRC protocol.
Further Standardization Attempts
IETF-IRCUP was an initiative started in January 1998, to gather all
the flavours of IRC servers to document a new RFC and possibly set a
new standard for all networks to commit to. That project died.
CTCP/2 was an attempt, started in 1997 by Bjorn Reese, to develop and
standardize the Client To Client Protocol that was never in the RFC.
Clients have been known to extend and modify the original CTCP
protocol without allowing non-compliant clients to filter the new
codes. CTCP/2 was meant to define how codes and perhaps more
important new codes should be introduced in order to let old clients
remain functional. It was also meant to address the IPv6 problems the
DCC intiating sequence has. The CTCP/2 project died as well.
We'll just have to wait and see what the future of IRC has to show...
IRC Popularity
According to measurements done by irc.netsplit.de, IRC in general
have lost users gradually since 2004/2005. Those years, the top 4 IRC
networks all had over 100,000 users each on a daily basis. Those
networks were Quakenet, Undernet, IRCnet and EFnet. Quakenet was in
the lead with more than 200,000 users.
In the beginning of 2011, Quakenet is just above 100,000 users and
the only network over 100K.
Thanks to
I did not experience all of this. I found information on various
places and I received information from various people in order to
write this. People that have helped me with this include:
Greg "wumpus" Lindahl
Vesa "vesa" Ruokonen
James Ng
Tuomas Heino
Richard (eagle`s on undernet)
Ari Lemmke