Internet Relay Chat
From the Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can change
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an chat system on the Internet. It allows people from around the world to have conversations together, but it can also be used to have a private one-on-one conversation.
The IRC chat rooms 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 over 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. Popular stand-alone clients includes mIRC for Microsoft Windows and X-Chat for *nix. The Opera web browser contains an IRC client built into the browser.
IRC bots are computer programs used to help control and protect chat rooms.
