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The history of IRC
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The history of IRC

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# 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,

submit an [issue](https://github.com/bagder/irchistory/issues) or post a

[pull-request](https://github.com/bagder/irchistory/pulls)!



Feel free to link to [this page](https://daniel.haxx.se/irchistory.html) or

host it elsewhere. Please keep Daniel Stenberg credited as author.



Other stories about [IRC history](http://www.irc.org/history.html).



## 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 Järvinen 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 a 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 for

a while.



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](

http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/communications/logs/Gulf-War/) 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

February 15th 1993, includes servers from USA, Canada, France, Croatia

and Japan. On August 15th, the new user count record was set to 57

users.



## RFC 1459



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 existence 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 original 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 initial few years.



This network was later renamed to Freenode.



In 2011, it peaked at 65,000 users in 40,000 channels. In 2021 it reached

90,000 users.



## libera.chat



In May 2021, there's a mass admin exodus from Freenode (after

disagreements with the owner of parts of the infra) and many of the

admins instead set camp over in the recently created [libera.chat](

https://libera.chat) network. Many channels formerly on

Freenode follows on over to libera.



## 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

flavors 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

initiating sequence has. The CTCP/2 project died as well.



[IRCv3](https://ircv3.net/) - *"We’re the IRCv3 Working Group – a

collection of IRC software developers and network staff that develop

extensions to the IRC client protocol"*

  

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](

https://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top10.php), IRC in general have lost

users gradually ever 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.



In 2021, Freenode (before its demise) is the largest one with peak of

90,000 users in February.



## 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



## See Also



The Serial Port's [IRC documentary on

YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UbKenFipjo). This documentation and

me talking to them are reasons for the "special thanks" to me shown in the end

of the episode.