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Originally Posted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfers via Direct Client-to-Client. As of May 2009, the top 100 IRC networks served more than half a million users at a time, with hundreds of thousands of channels (the vast majority of which stand mostly vacant), operating on a total of roughly 1,500 servers worldwide. IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox in Finland. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET. IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d'йtat attempt throughout a media blackout. It was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War. Logs of these and other events are kept in the ibiblio archive. IRC client software is available for virtually every computer operating system that supports TCP/IP networking.