IRC History by Jarkko Oikarinen
I
don't know if this helps much. I hope I remember things correctly
and apologise people whom I have left out and they had deserved
to be in here.
I
was working in the Department of Information Processing Science
in University of Oulu during summer'88. I guess they didn't have
much for me to do. I was administring the department's sun server,
but it didn't take all time. So I started doing a communications
program, which was meant to make OuluBox (a Public Access BBS
running on host tolsun.oulu.fi, administered by me) a little more
usable. The purpose was to allow USENET News-kind of discussion
and groups there in addition to real time discussions and other
BBS related stuff. Jyrki Kuoppala (jkp@cs.hut.fi) had implemented
rmsg program for sending messages to people on other machines.
It didn't have the channel concept implemented (though it supported
it), so it was mainly used for person-to-person communications.
Another
already existing simple multiuser chat program on OuluBox was
MUT (MultiUser Talk), it was written by Jukka Pihl (pihl@rieska.oulu.fi).
That program has a bad habit of not working properly, so in order
to fix this, the first implemented thing of this BBS plan was
IRC. The birthday of IRC was in August 1988. The exact date is
unknown, at the end of the month anyways.
Bitnet
Relay Chat was a good inspiration for IRC. When IRC started occasionally
having more than 10 users, I asked some friends of mine to start
running irc servers in south Finland, mainly in Tampere University
of Technology and Helsinki University of Technology. Some other
universities soon followed. Markku J{rvinen (mta@cc.tut.fi) improved
the irc client (there was only one at that time) to support some
emacs editing commands. At that time it was obvious that adding
BBS like functions to the program was not a good idea, it's better
to have one program for one purpose. So the BBS extension idea
was given up and just IRC stayed.
IRC
was well spread in Finland. I contacted some friends of mine through
BITNET Relay and asked if they would try this program. Internet
connections did not yet work from Finland to other countries,
so they could not connect to the Finnish network (which I suppose
was the reason for them not being very enthusiastic about irc).
Internet connections to states started working (I don't anymore
remember when). I answered to some news articles where people
asked for multiuser chat programs. I didn't get replies.
At
mit, there was the legendary ai.ai.mit.edu machine running ITS.
I got an account there and learned to use it a little bit. Enough
to know how to chat with people. From there I got the first IRC
user outside Scandinavia, Mike Jacobs used IRC through OuluBox
(he did not have account on any Unix machines).
Through
ai.ai.mit.edu I got to know Vijay Subramaniam (I hope I spelled
that correctly :-). I had given IRC to him and not heard of him
for some time. Then I got mail messages from Jeff Trim (used to
be jtrim@orion.cair.du.edu, University of Denver, current address
unknown) David Bleckmann (bleckmd@jacobs.cs.orst.edu) and Todd
Ferguson (melvin@jacobs.cs.orst.edu, Oregon State University).
Vijay had given IRC to them and they had started ircd on their
machines (orion.cair.du.edu and jacobcs.cs.orst.edu, if I remember
correctly) and wanted to connect to Finnish irc network. After
that some other people started running IRC, and the number of
servers grew quickly. The first IRC server (and still running)
was tolsun.oulu.fi ..
Jarkko
Oikarinen