March 12, 2021 • 41 mins
What is Internet Relay Chat? How does IRC work and what does it do? TechStuff looks at this legacy chat tech.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And it is Friday.
That means it is that it's time for a classic episode.
(00:25):
And this episode originally published on March two thousand and fourteen.
It is titled time for an I r C Chat.
I hope you guys enjoy. Let's listen. In long time
listeners of tech Stuff might be thinking, we already did
an episode on I r C, and you are completely correct.
Jonathan and Chris did one of those way back on
(00:45):
June called what is I r C? But it was
it was more of a basic overview of what the
service is and how it came about and how people
use it. We wanted to go a little bit more
into the history of I r C. Thanks Mo Splee
to an idea from listener Addie Um that's at Addie
cyrom One on Twitter, who said, can you do an
(01:06):
episode on I r C? And we said sure, yeah.
I just want to make it clear that I listened
to that podcast from and I have no memory of
ever saying those words, and I it sounds like I'm
making a joke, but I was, like I, I clearly
recognized my voice, but there is nothing in my brain
that held onto the fact that I did an episode
(01:27):
about I r C already. So we if you did
listen to that episode and you have a better memory
than I do, some of this might sound familiar, but
go with us, all right, So let's start our our
journey down memory lane, and and also open up a
few other doors on the way if I can make
some metaphors. So what exactly is I r C. Well,
(01:49):
as we have mentioned even just in the past couple
of minutes, here, it stands for Internet Relay check Weight.
I have no memory, Jonathan, this is becoming a problem.
I know that you're off caffeine today. Better it might
be the issue. Yeah, I gave up caffeine and now
now I'm all sorts of messed up, y'all. So yeah,
it's it's actually a platform for real time chat on
the Internet. And it's text based. It's not you know,
(02:11):
voice or video or anything like that. This is actually
typing in your little type type. It's a it's a
type of instant messenger. Might be a phrase that people
are more familiar with these days, although I would argue
that most instant messengers are probably based on I r C. Yeah.
I r C is also group based, as opposed to
a one on one discussion. You would It's almost like
(02:33):
if you were to go to a physical location where
the people at a physical location are all all interested
in a particular topic, and you walk through the door
and you join the conversation. Except in I r C
you can actually be in multiple rooms at the same time,
having multiple conversations about multiple topics, right, because you're going
through a server. Yeah, a server that has multiple different
(02:55):
kind of rooms, virtual rooms, or or channels exactly. And
each channel has its own name. Uh. Most of the time,
the channel name kind of gives you an idea of
what the subject is some of them. Some of them
are general subjects. They're pretty straightforward. It's uh, yeah, like
hashtag firefly fans. I guess that would be people who
(03:15):
really enjoy bugs that light up at night. That clearly
must be it to to connect to these kind of spaces,
you have to use a program, a client, an app YEP.
So you've got this client server relationship the servers what
houses the connections, and the client is what you use
to have your computer connect to the server. And these
(03:36):
days there are many much clients, yeah, and lots and
lots of servers too, So the clients exist for all
sorts of different operating systems. So you're not going to
be left out, you know, if you're if you're saying,
but I use a Mac, how could I participate in
this wonderful world that is I r C. First of all,
I'd say, well, you're about a decade late to this party,
(03:58):
more than a decade later, it turns out. But also
I would say, don't worry, because every operating system has
a host of clients you can choose from. Many have
very different capabilities that are built in. Some of them
are more intuitive than others. And there are also lots
and lots of servers on them. And UH. The other
interesting things is that the servers can connect to each
other to form networks. And in fact, that's how I
(04:20):
r C got started. It started with an a network originally, UH,
and then eventually reached the world that we're in today
where you have all these different servers UH and networks
that some of them are not connected to each other.
So in other words, there may be channels on one
server that you really like and channels on another server
that you really like. Those two servers aren't connected, so
(04:41):
you have to connect to either one separately in order
to access the stuff that you want exactly. Yeah, it's
not like you can just jump from channel to channel
if those servers have no connection between them. And uh
so it's meant for, like we said, group discussions, you know,
having a big group conversation. There are ways that you
can send private message is went forth um, and to communicate,
(05:02):
you just type your text into a little text field.
Think of a divided window. So the window on the
top is sort of the ongoing conversation within that channel,
and the window below, it's very narrow, is really a
text field for you to type in. And then you
can also enter in commands I r C commands. We
talked a lot about I r C commands in the
two thousand ten episode, so I highly recommend you go
(05:25):
and check that out if you're really interested. For one thing,
the commands are dependent upon what client you use because
the different systems use slightly different phrasing. Yeah, just imagine that,
you know, think of it as evolution, and at one
point all these different client philosophies split and then evolved
on their separate pathways, which is actually exactly what happens,
which we will talk about. Yeah, so that's the basic
(05:48):
way that these things work. So so let's talk about
how this actually came to happen. It all started way
back in y'all when when we mentioned that you are
or twenty years too late, we were not really kidding
um and and for the record, on all of this
history stuff that we're about to talk about, there are
a bunch of vaguely conflicting reports about all of it
(06:09):
because no one was really documenting it at the time.
No one was expecting this to be something that someone
would be sitting in a podcast room talking about. It's
It's the way a lot of things unfold eventually is
that unless there was someone who was officially a chronicler,
uh you just get you know, kind of time is estimations. So,
(06:29):
for example, the birth of I. R. C Is often
said to be sometime around the end of August nine,
but we don't remember what the day was because the
operative person um one yarco a k A whiz Karen,
I'm gonna go I think it's I. I think it's okay.
(06:53):
So here's the thing, guys, he's finished. There are a
lot of Finnish people involved in the development of I
r C, and we are Americans who have a vast
ignorance on the way to pronounce Finish names. Lauren has
done her best to to decipher this. I have not,
and hilarity shall ensue. Now. I want to extend all
(07:14):
my apologies to my Finnish friends who are going to
cringe every time I mangle a name. But just no,
it's not at a malice. It's just from ignorance. Yea
yea ignorance um. But so at any rate, he was
working at the University of Aulu in Finland, and he
was working specifically in the Department of Information Processing Science,
(07:36):
and he thought, you know, I want to include some
sort of chat functionality in this BBS service software that
I am installing BBS bulletin board system. So this is
sort of the predecessor to you know, these were like
those those local networks that you could log into. It
wasn't an Internet, it was something that you could dial
(07:57):
directly into a BBS and get a net like uh services,
including things like messaging an email, but it was usually
restricted just to that BBS. So in other words, again
it was they were like little islands as opposed to
a global internet. Yeah, there was usenet, which was a
little bit more expansive and had more group discussion kind
(08:22):
of functions. But but one of the ideas that Yorko
had was that he really wanted to to integrate that
into a real time chat capacity, right, and he started
looking around for inspiration u and one of them was
a bit chat client that was developed by a friend
of his. He actually started borrowing parts of multi user
chat programs that were written by other people, including then
(08:44):
tell me if I get this one wrong, or key
yes your key, I don't know, Copala no, I got
that one wrong, and Yoka Peel and uh. So his
friends had been working on similar ideas for other implementations,
and at the end of August, n r C was
(09:05):
switched on and it lived on a single computer, so
just one computer in the world running the server software
for i r C. So then you had this group
of friends campaigned the university to eventually allow them to
release this code to a wider audience because technically the
(09:28):
code belonged to the university itself. And I love the
way that the that Yarko talks about the the development.
He says, once it got up to ten users, I
knew that I wanted to let other people have a
crack at this, and I thought ten on the Internet
was very I mean, it wasn't really the Internet yet.
(09:49):
The Internet was a yeah, the Internet was was just
the realm of research organizations and universities. No one outside
of that really had much access to it. Besides it
was some government agencies as well, but you know, we
plebians out in the real world didn't have any access
to it. The Worldwide Web was more than a decade away,
(10:10):
so this was you know, this was early early days,
so ten was actually a significant number. Just I just
joke about it because I think of our discussion about
Twitter from a few weeks ago about how the five
thousand number was so small. But yeah, ten people. So
he just he convinces the university to allow them to
release this code to some other people, and they started
(10:31):
getting it installed in other universities in Finland first and
they joined on and then looked at other countries as well.
But there were some issues there right there, there were
a few like inter country connectivity issues apparently. Uh yeah,
because I mean at this point, again, internet is not
a real thing, right right, Yeah yeah. Yrkill remembers there
(10:55):
being specific problems connecting his his networks in Finland with
US networks, but this wouldn't go on for very long. Yeah. Yeah,
there were improvements in the infrastructure going on at the
same time as I r C starting to catch on
in popularity. In fact, by November of that year, of
universities in Colorado and Oregon would become connected to the
(11:18):
I r C network. Um they would set up their
own servers and and hook everything up together, so it
was no longer solely finished and what it was just
getting started. I couldn't help myself. UM and uh Jorco
had connected with some people through m I T S
network and distributed a couple of copies and it basically
(11:38):
just went wild. I mean like he did. He didn't
distribute it physically to all of these people that ended
up setting up their their their own versions. But yeah,
it's actually kind of funny, like the story about the
Colorado coming online. As I understand it, one of the
other UH universities in Finland there was a user who
was very interested in it, who then passed it on
(11:58):
to someone who was at in Colorado, who then uh,
you know, so it was it was growing organically. It
wasn't like a planned out this is how we're rolling
this out. It was it was a viral. Yeah. He
was just like, hey, check out the school thing that
I made, and and all of a sudden he would
see it pop up in other places. So that was
August to November. It took very little time at all.
(12:19):
By mid there were forty servers worldwide. Uh, and by
nineteen ninety the average number of active servers so forty
servers worldwide that not all of them are necessarily active
all the time. So by the number of active servers
and the number of active users at any particular given
time was still pretty modest. We're talking twelve users and
(12:41):
thirty eight servers. Granted, the original code for I r
C really only accounted for some hundred users to be
connected all at the same time. And uh. Furthermore, according
to some numbers around that same time, there were only
three million people worldwide who even had access to the Internet.
So right and and doing something like if you've ever
connected to a BBS in the old days. A lot
(13:02):
of those original bbs has only had capacity for a
couple of people to connect at a time. So for
something to have the capacity to allow a hundred people
to communicate simultaneously was a huge deal. It was it
would turn out to not be scalable really all, which
created many problems down the line. Yes. In fact, so
in August, that's when one of these problems starts to
(13:24):
rear its head, and that the I r C community
suffers its first schism, but not the last one. Hey, guys,
we'll chat some more about I r C in just
a moment, but first let's take a quick break. So
(13:44):
in this corner you have the traditional I C community,
and on the other corner you had a group that
just they you know, they didn't want people to tell
him what to do. They wanted they wanted freedom from
rules rules of four squares. Man, I don't know if
they actually used that voices, that's exactly how people talk
(14:07):
to I'm old enough to remember, I see. So So
these two groups split and the kind of anarchists, the
anarchists sort of side founded a net which stood in
fact for anarchist net. Yes, and the rest of it
became known as e f net, which stands for Aris
Free Network e r I s Aris Free network and
(14:28):
why because the server that a net was founded on
was named Aris dot Berkeley dot e d U. So,
in other words, you had one group of people who
are like, we kind of want the freedom to do
whatever we like, because we don't like these rules where
you say we can't do things like take over someone's
channel just because they weren't smart enough to block us
(14:48):
from and since they're not smart enough, they should not
be allowed to run that channel. I should be allowed
to run it and do whatever I want. I'm being
I'm certainly adding a little more motivation here than there
was probably in the literature. But that's kind of how
I do things. Well, I mean, you are you are
being snarky, But first of all, snark is what you do.
Snark is what both of us do. Snark is what
tech stuff does. We embrace it. We do. Um, but uh,
(15:12):
the folks who are on that that a net did
really enjoy exploiting um what was called nick colliding and
this is um. Yeah, so here's the thing, Like you
would choose a nickname when you log into a channel
or or a server to to chat with other people,
and this nickname represents who you are. You can choose
any nickname you want given the character limit of that
(15:35):
that's supported by that particular client and server. So one
thing that could happen is that if you try to
choose what you know, another person's nickname, the system would
generally prevent you from doing that, saying that that name
is already taken. But if you were able to orchestrate
an event or take advantage of an event where everyone
is kicked out of a room and then you rejoin
(15:56):
that room or channel, I should say, everyone's kicked out
of a channel, you rejoined that channel before the operator
or OP can join that channel, and you name yourself
the OPS name. You could end up giving yourself OP
powers for that channel, and you prevent the rightful OP
from being able to take hold. And so that's nick colliding.
It's when these nicknames collide. In One way that that
(16:17):
would happen is you would have what what's called a
net split. A net split is when uh you have
two servers that are connected to a network that are
running the same sort of channel, and some people are
on one server, some people are on the other server,
but they're all in the same chat room. But then
somehow a connection between those servers breaks and then you
(16:38):
end up having two instances of that same channel. So
you've got half the people in one and half the
people in the other. So let's say that I'm a jerk.
I mean, it's easy to say, right, So I'm a jerk.
I've lugged into the mansion. I'm hold on, it's gonna
take me a second. Yeah, I know, it's okay. There's
you're in the forest. There's a tree, all right. So Lauren,
you're an OP and I'm a and I've logged into
(17:01):
the channel and right now I'm not being too jerky,
so you haven't booted me or anything like that. But
there's a net split, and you and your group are
in one server. I'm on another server, so we're on
separate ones. I say, uh, there's been a net split.
I shall change my name, yes, exactly, I'll change my
name to Lauren's name. And so I changed my nickname.
And then when the servers are reunited and it tries
(17:24):
to reconcile these two worlds into one because you have
two people with the same nickname, the nicknames collide, thus
Nick colliding, and it boots both people out of the channel. Now,
because I'm a jerk, and because I've planned for this,
I've already got another window open, so i can log
right back in using Lauren's nickname again. And Lauren, because
she wasn't expecting this because she was being decent, is
(17:47):
locked out of her own channel. That's kind of nick
colliding in a you know, in a nutshell, and that's
the sort of stuff these guys like to do. So
they started up their own party. They say, well, you know,
the e f net people for some reason don't find
this nearly as entertaining as we do, so we're gonna
make our own party. However, a net would not last
very long, and in fact, most users chose to go
(18:10):
with e f net instead, saying this anarchy thing doesn't
sound like it's a lot of fun or very you know,
a productive does Everyone being nice seems to make a
lot more sense, right, So then we have a unified
network e f net again. So it started off as
a unified network, had that one schism, A net did
(18:32):
not last very long. We're back to unified. However, then
you have a second splintering, which is when some users
left e f net to form tub net, which was
mostly kind of a The tub net folks were saying, look,
you need to fix things so that net splits happen
less frequently. They are, they're disruptive, you, it's it's ruining
(18:55):
the experience, right. The way that people react to net
splits is not the problem. The fact that year having
net splits at all is something that really needs to
be worked on more exactly. And so it wasn't so
much a disagreement with policy as it was we need
to improve this platform. So they left and uh tough
net had about five servers and around a hundred users,
but it didn't stay around very long either. People kind
(19:18):
of might kind of reabsorbed. Yeah, um and and again,
basically all of these were really scalability issues, um, which
which Jerko himself actually listed as being just about the
only thing that he would go back and change if
he had it to all do over again. Right. But
you know, again, hindsight being twenty, it was a lot
harder to imagine this back when you were doing something
where you had ten people on absolutely so an event,
(19:41):
a world event happens that ends up making i r
C a very useful utility for a certain population. That
was when the Gulf War broke out and you started
seeing lots of people using i r C to communicate
about the war, sharing news stories, sharing information as they
got it because different parts of the world we're getting
reports earlier than other parts, and everyone wanted to know
(20:05):
what was going on. And this was when they were
seeing the height of their popularity in their early days.
And keep in mind, again we're talking modest numbers. So
when we tell you how many users at the higher
their popularity, don't snicker, right, because for the first time
in history, it was it was about three concurrent users
at any given moment, and that that was a big deal. Uh,
(20:25):
you know, kind of similar to how we were saying
in the Twitter episode about how how people were so
impressed by the ability that this that this software gave
them to tune into live reporting about an issue, same
same thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly, So it was you know, really,
to me, what this says is it's it's it's a
(20:46):
premonition about what the Internet will be and how it
will be important and how people will use it to
communicate these important ideas in real time. Across the entire globe,
and even though it was very tiny, particularly compared to
something as enormous as the Internet, it was kind of
a proof of concept in many ways. So then another
(21:07):
split happens, but this one was not It was an
amicable split. It wasn't something where a bunch of people
were really upset. A user who used the nickname wild
Thang and yes that is how it's spelled, created a
test network to develop bots. So these are automated accounts.
Often they will create admins that are bots, and the
(21:28):
admin bots really are just there to scan for anything
that would be objectionable and react to it so that
if someone's typing in all caps, the bot can step
in and say, please, don't type in all caps. People
were much more sensitive about that in these early days
of Internet. Yeah, you know, because it was considered shouting.
And no, no, I mean it's still considered shouting. But
it's kind of funny these days. I think back back then,
(21:49):
if you're if your handle is drunk hulk, it's hilarious.
Well but at any rate times yes, okay, that's fair.
It's not not always hilarious, but frequently so the this
this approach, this Uh, this split to create this area
where they could test out bots. It was really just
men as a testing ground, but more and more people
(22:11):
wanted to join it to kind of play around with
things and test things out and see what else was possible.
And that is how the undernet was born. And uh,
it actually had some really useful goals. It wasn't just
about playing with bots and seeing what you could program
to to do. It also involved ways of registering channels
(22:32):
to users so that nick colliding was less of a problem.
The idea being that if you register the channel to
a user and you had some form of verification like
a password, that would really cut down on people being
able to take over a channel without authorization. So it
actually exists in parallel with the f net. It's not
(22:52):
trying to compete or anything. It's just it's just kind
of a like almost like a sandbox where people can
test out things. And uh, that's where I r C
really stopped being a united network and becomes a platform
that runs on different networks. This is the first time
we start seeing something that can survive on its own
and doesn't. It's not just a flash in the pan,
you know. Splinter group, So by May, the i r
(23:17):
C protocol is made available to the general public. It's
no longer just something that's being spread from uh, you know,
one one enthusiast to another. Now it's available for anyone.
And the summer of nineteen Uh, we get a fork
in under net. So we've talked about splintering with e
f net. Now undernet itself forks and another group called
(23:40):
down net d a l n et is born and
it was really trying to bring more stability and security
to the i r C platform exactly. And a lot
of their their improvements were made by a guy named
Brian morpher Smith. So again looking to improve the platform. Uh.
(24:01):
I think these splits are looked upon with much more
fondness by people. You know, everyone was trying to make
it better as opposed to having having like deep philosophical
disagreements within the community. Uh. And then in undernet would
split again, but this time it was it was one
of those UM system problems, infrastructure problems. Uh. You see,
(24:23):
there was a server in Australia that was part of
the undernet, but connecting from Australia to the rest of
the world there was a lot of lag, so huge
delays you would type something in, you'd hit enter, it
would take you know, several seconds for it to to
transfer over. By then whatever, the topic of conversation has
changed dramatically. Everyone thinks that you're being either obtuse or
(24:47):
just really slow. But it turns us just because there's lag.
So there was a conscious decision to split from the
undernet UH and to create a new Australian based network
called oz org. So so this was again another one
of those beneficial splits that that was really done for
the good of the community rather than due to UH
(25:07):
inter community arguments. Exactly. Yeah, it's really I mean it was.
It was sad in a way because it meant that
the Australians became kind of you know, insulated from everybody
else and everyone else was denied the pleasure of Australian company.
But it was due specifically to technological you know, shortcomings
that had nothing to do with philosophical disagreements. Our next
(25:28):
item on the list, however, is very much one of
those angry philosophical disagreements. Yes, this is what is called
the Great Split, which you know, I've had a few
of those in bowling and they are really a pain.
But this happened in July of nine six. I r
c net splits off from e f net and uh
(25:49):
I are s net and e f net are are
still kind of like these odds. Yeah, there's so it
was over generally, it was over a disagreement on how
to handle operational issue, right. It was basically a culmination
of all of those old arguments over how NICK collisions
should be handled and over exactly how much power ops
(26:09):
and admins should have in their in their channels. It
was really to try and define these roles in different
ways because as it turns out, we'll talk about a
little bit a little bit later about how the definitions
of operators versus admins it's a little money depending upon
which service you're using, um. And also the capabilities that
ops and admins have are different depending upon you know,
(26:31):
the actual servers and clients that are being used. So
there were some disagreements and we ended up having the
split I r C net actually more out of coincidence
than planning. It wound up being I mean, I mean
cultural and geographical and and both of those. I mean,
there are a few servers that the jump ship one
way or another, but yeah, most of the ones in
(26:52):
I r C net are in Europe and Australia and Japan,
and most of the e F net ones are in
the US. So it ended up kind of just being
on that dividing line. It wasn't it wasn't like US
versus everybody else. It just kind of that's just kind
of how it shook out. And since then, multiple networks
have appeared running on I r C. So you had
(27:12):
this unified network, although it's very very tiny comparatively speaking. Uh,
and now that you have a bunch of separate networks.
At its height of popularity, which was a long time
ago in two thousand three, I r C had one
million users. As of January, that had dropped to about
four thousand, but it's still not terribly shabby and it's
(27:35):
still used quite a bit by a lot of I mean,
there are a lot of communities I go to where
I r C chat rooms are incorporated into the experience,
like like sites that do streaming video where they'll do
some forum a broadcast if they don't have a native
chat client that's part of that service. I r C
is the way that almost all of them go, and
(27:56):
that includes big names, like big companies all the way
to down too little independent operators because it's an open
source approach. We've got a little bit more to say
about i r C, but before we get to that,
let's take another quake break. Okay, so we're back, and
(28:18):
now i'd kind of like to talk about the hierarchy
of things that you know, like the people who are
on I r C, because before the break we mentioned
that there's a little bit of confusion in the ranks
of what an OP versus an ADMIN is and how
much control they have over what's going on. Right, So,
(28:39):
for one thing, operator is used by some services for
two different things. An operator might be a person who
has complete control of the server which has all the
stuff running on it, or just complete control over the
channel like a specific UH chat room exactly, so you
could have multiple channels on a single erver UH. And
(29:01):
then the operator is the person who could either be
in charge of everything or in charge of justice specific channel.
Another frequent term is admin that tends to be someone
who's in charge of a channel. So these are people
who have extra commands at their disposal beyond the ones
that any user has, and these commands allow you to
(29:22):
do lots of different things that make it useful, uh,
in order to have things run smoothly on your channel. So,
for instance, you can mute people, which is often useful
if someone is being particularly probably yeah, and you don't
want to just boot them and ban them, maybe you
mute them so that they don't even know that, Like,
they don't know that their stuff is not showing up,
(29:42):
so they're still typing wildly, but none of it's coming through, right,
so everyone else is blissfully ignorant. I mean sometimes that's
easier because you know, booting booting someone, which is another
thing they can do. They can kick people out of
a room, which generally speaking, booting does not disconnect you
from I r C, but it will disconnect you from
that channel. You often will then have either a ban
(30:04):
on the channel so you can't go back into it,
or um, you know, you can go back in, but
then the OP will give you a stern warning and
say if you do this, I will ban you from
the server, which means you don't you know, you don't
just get banned from the channel but the server itself. Uh. Now, granted,
there are ways around that if you're particularly trollish and
you want to take extra effort to really be a
pain in the patucas, but you know that's what the
(30:27):
mute buttons for. Also, you can do moderated discussions. So
a moderated discussion is where you have an admin who
picks who gets to talk. When this is really useful
if you wanted to do something like a question answer
session and you have someone who is addressing a group
of people and then wants to take in questions, but
you can't just be flooded by them, uh, and admin
(30:48):
may take on the role of moderator who then picks
the person who will ask the question in text and
in the person you know whoever's answering will then address that.
So that's also very useful. And there are other ends
as well. There's some UM confusion about what operators exactly
can cannot do. There are people who essentially ascribe them
godlike powers and they could do anything they wanted, and
(31:11):
that's not entirely true. There's some great UM resources on
i RC dot org if you want to go there
and check it out. There there's frequently ask question guides
that will answer everything, including one about what exactly cannon
op and can't and OP do to try and demystified
a little bit. It's an entertaining read, so I would
recommend it. So let's talk a little bit about them.
(31:32):
What's actually under the hood, How is this actually working?
This is where we get into the tech of the
tech stuff. And yeah, so it's open protocol. We mentioned
it earlier, and it relies on TCP. That's transmission controlled protocol, right,
And that's one of the two biggies that were created
by the Power Team events SURF and bob Con, the
(31:54):
other being i P, Y T c P, I P
are the big ones. You know, you probably have heard
them before. These are essentially the rules that create the
the traffic guidelines for data across networks. Well, without these rules,
computers wouldn't have a standardized approach to sending and receiving data,
and you wouldn't be able to have this incredible packet
(32:16):
switching network out there where you can send stuff across
the network and not worry if a computer or ten
computers or a hundred computers go down in the process
as long as whichever computer is the destination is still
active because it can reroute, so right, right, Although this
does mean that it's not technically part of the Worldwide
Web exactly. Of course, there are web based clients that
(32:39):
let you log into I r C. Right, yeah, you
want you don't necessarily these days need to download an
I r C client to your computer and then run
that as a separate program. Uh, for particular websites. Not
obviously you're not necessarily going to be able to visit
any channel anywhere. But you know, I was meant the
(33:00):
idea of that moderated discussion. Uh, So if you're going
to say a streaming site, I'll use a real example. So, um,
there's uh, there's a web podcast publication company called the
frog Pants Network run by a guy named Scott Johnson.
He does a lot of really funny podcasts. He streams
his podcasts live, he records somebody streams them live, and
(33:23):
he invites people to come into this chat room and
participate in a discussion. So, uh, that would allow you.
You go to the website where the the video is streaming,
and just underneath it is this little web based I
r C client and all you do is type in
whatever nickname you want to use and hit enter, and
then away you go, and you can make as many
goofy jokes as you like, which Scott uh encourages that's
(33:47):
the kind of world he lives, and I appreciate it
so anyway that that's an example. But yes, it's it
itself is not part of the world Wide Web. It
predates the World Wide Web, so that's important to him. Member,
And you know, I know that most people these days
have a grasp on that. I just remember a time
when Worldwide Web and Internet were synonymous to most people,
(34:09):
Like you know, if they thought of the Internet, they
were thinking Worldwide Web. They weren't They didn't realize that email, FTP,
all these other protocols are also part of it, right
right then they existed in layers, yes, exactly. So to
log in, like we said, you'd launch that client an appy,
and you would direct it to the appropriate server because
there are different ones. Like you, if you've got an app,
(34:30):
that's just all it is is just running this program.
It needs to know where you're where to point it,
like you have to tell it there are many different
servers that I might have access to. And then once
you got to that server, then you would have to
try and you know, find the right channel. You might
look through a list of channels and designate the specific
one you want to join. You could join multiple channels
and then switch between them so that you're part of
(34:51):
multiple conversations all at the same time. And some servers,
depending on which one you have logged into, UM might
ask you to create a user name and even a password. Yeah,
so instead of just coming in under a nickname, because
some of them will just assign you a random string
like a nine digit number. Right, I feel like like
you are web visitors eight seven b Q four. Well,
(35:12):
that's a great catchy name. But you can also designate
your your nickname or user name, and like like Lauren said,
some of them will also allow you to create a
password which will protect your nickname so that no one
else can have it. From that. From that, right that
nick duplication thing, which usually only works on some of
them are server wide, but a lot of them are
just channel specific. So in other words, there could be
(35:34):
someone in another channel posing as you and being a
total jerk. Uh. That's my excuse for having multiple personalities
on an I r C server where one of me
is really friendly and one of me is not. I'm complex.
So since it's a client server architecture and it's not
on this distributed network, that's where you are able to,
(35:55):
you know, access lots of different stuff, but only the
stuff that's available on that server. Like we were saying earlier,
if there are channels that you want to visit, but
that server doesn't host those channels, you're out of luck.
I mean, you create a channel maybe if you have
the permissions to do that, but you might not be
in with all of your buddies, similar to like like
World Warcraft or something like that. You have to all
(36:16):
join up in the same right to play the same game, right,
because those servers have a limitation on how much they
can support and once you reach that, that's it. So
uh yeah, it's you know, that's also where the the
net split thing comes into play, because if you do
have multiple servers connected together that are running the same
channel and they split, that's where you get that problem
is talking about earlier, where the actual audience splits up
(36:39):
and you end up with talking to just a fraction
of the room. Right, Although the servers can be connected together, Yeah, yeah,
you can connect a lot of them together. That's where
you know, that was the whole idea behind the original
I r C network. It's just it's funny because if
you look at I r C today, you wouldn't think
of it as starting as a unified network because there's
so many different servers and networks out there. So today
(37:02):
it just looks like it was something that grew into
like it started out as islands all growing separately, but
in fact it was one land mass that later broke
into separate islands. But but yeah, but you can you
can connect those islands back to one another retroactively these
days if you want to. If an OP wants to
give his or her users access to a greater number
(37:25):
of channels, sure, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, as
long as you're all running the same I r C
server software, you're you're good to go. Once in a while,
like we said, you get those broken connections, that's a bummer.
And also lag is an issue. Um, there are times
where lag will be a particular problem and you find
it frustrating to communicate. There's an actual command slash ping
(37:49):
that will tell you how long the delay is between
when you type something in and when it respond When
how long it takes a message to go from the
server and from the server back to you. You can
also ping other users to find out how long it
takes for a message to go from you to that
person and from the person back to you. So that way,
if you're doing these little private messages off to the side,
(38:09):
you know, if someone's not responding to you and maybe
because they just they're they're lagging, Yeah, you can understand
whether you have in fact lost connection or if there's
a leg or or if they're just ignoring you. Yes,
like if you get the instead of a lag message,
it just says I'm washing my hair. Just take the
hint because I don't have hair. Guys, I tell you
(38:30):
I'm washing my hair, it just means I don't want
to talk anyway. So if you listen to that episode
we talked about earlier, we go into a lot more
detail about the different commands that are available to your
basic user and explained that why you know, the ones
that you might find on one version, like the undernet,
are different than e F net, that are different than
(38:51):
I r C Net, because like we said, these all
evolved separately once they split off from each other, and
you know, it's been all several decades since they were
for introduced. Yeah, yeah, I find that I find it
really interesting that it all of this time has passed,
and that it is still in use, perhaps not widely
in use now that there are many other options that
are pretty widely populated. But Jarko himself once once said
(39:16):
in a talk with the Undernet Public Relations Committee, Um,
what makes I r C special is a sense of anonymity.
The only things that you often know of the other
person are those that you can conclude from the discussions. Right, So,
for example, you may conclude that they have a shared
interest in a particular topic, assuming that they are being
genuine when they joined that that channel, because you know trolls, sure,
(39:41):
but but but other other than that, you know, it's
it's not like this is linked to your Facebook or
your Twitter or other personally identifiable information. You don't even
necessarily have to use a user name that you're going
to put in use anywhere else on the Internet. Right,
you might be able, you might feel more free to
express thoughts that you otherwise would feel would be uh,
(40:01):
you'd be judged upon, you know, not not even in
a trollish way, I mean just being honest and upfront.
And maybe maybe you're looking for friends who can support
you in something that you don't really feel comfortable talking
to the folks around you. I mean that happens, so
it certainly has a valuable place. And like I said,
I still use I r C. I mean, I still
(40:21):
uh joined these conversations. There are shows that I have
been a guest on that have used I r C
chat rooms. I love having that available and seeing what
the live audience is saying during the show. Usually there's
a lag of about you know, ten seconds or so
between what what we do on the video and when
people see it and are able to respond to it.
(40:42):
So but it's still I mean, if a good show
that does this, they'll actually incorporate user responses and and
they call people out and and and you know, give
them credit or or you know, shame them publicly, depending
upon the the appropriate response. But it's it's one of
those things that enriches Internet experience. Absolutely. Yeah. I have
(41:02):
very fond memories of it from um probably about two
thousand four to two eight, I think is when I
was using m I r C, which is the Microsoft
client for it. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic
episode of tech Stuff. If you have any suggestions for
future topics I should cover, let me know the best
way to do that. Is to hop over to Twitter
and use the handled text stuff h s W I'll
(41:24):
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And it is Friday.
That means it is that it's time for a classic episode.
(00:25):
And this episode originally published on March two thousand and fourteen.
It is titled time for an I r C Chat.
I hope you guys enjoy. Let's listen. In long time
listeners of tech Stuff might be thinking, we already did
an episode on I r C, and you are completely correct.
Jonathan and Chris did one of those way back on
(00:45):
June called what is I r C? But it was
it was more of a basic overview of what the
service is and how it came about and how people
use it. We wanted to go a little bit more
into the history of I r C. Thanks Mo Splee
to an idea from listener Addie Um that's at Addie
cyrom One on Twitter, who said, can you do an
(01:06):
episode on I r C? And we said sure, yeah.
I just want to make it clear that I listened
to that podcast from and I have no memory of
ever saying those words, and I it sounds like I'm
making a joke, but I was, like I, I clearly
recognized my voice, but there is nothing in my brain
that held onto the fact that I did an episode
(01:27):
about I r C already. So we if you did
listen to that episode and you have a better memory
than I do, some of this might sound familiar, but
go with us, all right, So let's start our our
journey down memory lane, and and also open up a
few other doors on the way if I can make
some metaphors. So what exactly is I r C. Well,
(01:49):
as we have mentioned even just in the past couple
of minutes, here, it stands for Internet Relay check Weight.
I have no memory, Jonathan, this is becoming a problem.
I know that you're off caffeine today. Better it might
be the issue. Yeah, I gave up caffeine and now
now I'm all sorts of messed up, y'all. So yeah,
it's it's actually a platform for real time chat on
the Internet. And it's text based. It's not you know,
(02:11):
voice or video or anything like that. This is actually
typing in your little type type. It's a it's a
type of instant messenger. Might be a phrase that people
are more familiar with these days, although I would argue
that most instant messengers are probably based on I r C. Yeah.
I r C is also group based, as opposed to
a one on one discussion. You would It's almost like
(02:33):
if you were to go to a physical location where
the people at a physical location are all all interested
in a particular topic, and you walk through the door
and you join the conversation. Except in I r C
you can actually be in multiple rooms at the same time,
having multiple conversations about multiple topics, right, because you're going
through a server. Yeah, a server that has multiple different
(02:55):
kind of rooms, virtual rooms, or or channels exactly. And
each channel has its own name. Uh. Most of the time,
the channel name kind of gives you an idea of
what the subject is some of them. Some of them
are general subjects. They're pretty straightforward. It's uh, yeah, like
hashtag firefly fans. I guess that would be people who
(03:15):
really enjoy bugs that light up at night. That clearly
must be it to to connect to these kind of spaces,
you have to use a program, a client, an app YEP.
So you've got this client server relationship the servers what
houses the connections, and the client is what you use
to have your computer connect to the server. And these
(03:36):
days there are many much clients, yeah, and lots and
lots of servers too, So the clients exist for all
sorts of different operating systems. So you're not going to
be left out, you know, if you're if you're saying,
but I use a Mac, how could I participate in
this wonderful world that is I r C. First of all,
I'd say, well, you're about a decade late to this party,
(03:58):
more than a decade later, it turns out. But also
I would say, don't worry, because every operating system has
a host of clients you can choose from. Many have
very different capabilities that are built in. Some of them
are more intuitive than others. And there are also lots
and lots of servers on them. And UH. The other
interesting things is that the servers can connect to each
other to form networks. And in fact, that's how I
(04:20):
r C got started. It started with an a network originally, UH,
and then eventually reached the world that we're in today
where you have all these different servers UH and networks
that some of them are not connected to each other.
So in other words, there may be channels on one
server that you really like and channels on another server
that you really like. Those two servers aren't connected, so
(04:41):
you have to connect to either one separately in order
to access the stuff that you want exactly. Yeah, it's
not like you can just jump from channel to channel
if those servers have no connection between them. And uh
so it's meant for, like we said, group discussions, you know,
having a big group conversation. There are ways that you
can send private message is went forth um, and to communicate,
(05:02):
you just type your text into a little text field.
Think of a divided window. So the window on the
top is sort of the ongoing conversation within that channel,
and the window below, it's very narrow, is really a
text field for you to type in. And then you
can also enter in commands I r C commands. We
talked a lot about I r C commands in the
two thousand ten episode, so I highly recommend you go
(05:25):
and check that out if you're really interested. For one thing,
the commands are dependent upon what client you use because
the different systems use slightly different phrasing. Yeah, just imagine that,
you know, think of it as evolution, and at one
point all these different client philosophies split and then evolved
on their separate pathways, which is actually exactly what happens,
which we will talk about. Yeah, so that's the basic
(05:48):
way that these things work. So so let's talk about
how this actually came to happen. It all started way
back in y'all when when we mentioned that you are
or twenty years too late, we were not really kidding
um and and for the record, on all of this
history stuff that we're about to talk about, there are
a bunch of vaguely conflicting reports about all of it
(06:09):
because no one was really documenting it at the time.
No one was expecting this to be something that someone
would be sitting in a podcast room talking about. It's
It's the way a lot of things unfold eventually is
that unless there was someone who was officially a chronicler,
uh you just get you know, kind of time is estimations. So,
(06:29):
for example, the birth of I. R. C Is often
said to be sometime around the end of August nine,
but we don't remember what the day was because the
operative person um one yarco a k A whiz Karen,
I'm gonna go I think it's I. I think it's okay.
(06:53):
So here's the thing, guys, he's finished. There are a
lot of Finnish people involved in the development of I
r C, and we are Americans who have a vast
ignorance on the way to pronounce Finish names. Lauren has
done her best to to decipher this. I have not,
and hilarity shall ensue. Now. I want to extend all
(07:14):
my apologies to my Finnish friends who are going to
cringe every time I mangle a name. But just no,
it's not at a malice. It's just from ignorance. Yea
yea ignorance um. But so at any rate, he was
working at the University of Aulu in Finland, and he
was working specifically in the Department of Information Processing Science,
(07:36):
and he thought, you know, I want to include some
sort of chat functionality in this BBS service software that
I am installing BBS bulletin board system. So this is
sort of the predecessor to you know, these were like
those those local networks that you could log into. It
wasn't an Internet, it was something that you could dial
(07:57):
directly into a BBS and get a net like uh services,
including things like messaging an email, but it was usually
restricted just to that BBS. So in other words, again
it was they were like little islands as opposed to
a global internet. Yeah, there was usenet, which was a
little bit more expansive and had more group discussion kind
(08:22):
of functions. But but one of the ideas that Yorko
had was that he really wanted to to integrate that
into a real time chat capacity, right, and he started
looking around for inspiration u and one of them was
a bit chat client that was developed by a friend
of his. He actually started borrowing parts of multi user
chat programs that were written by other people, including then
(08:44):
tell me if I get this one wrong, or key
yes your key, I don't know, Copala no, I got
that one wrong, and Yoka Peel and uh. So his
friends had been working on similar ideas for other implementations,
and at the end of August, n r C was
(09:05):
switched on and it lived on a single computer, so
just one computer in the world running the server software
for i r C. So then you had this group
of friends campaigned the university to eventually allow them to
release this code to a wider audience because technically the
(09:28):
code belonged to the university itself. And I love the
way that the that Yarko talks about the the development.
He says, once it got up to ten users, I
knew that I wanted to let other people have a
crack at this, and I thought ten on the Internet
was very I mean, it wasn't really the Internet yet.
(09:49):
The Internet was a yeah, the Internet was was just
the realm of research organizations and universities. No one outside
of that really had much access to it. Besides it
was some government agencies as well, but you know, we
plebians out in the real world didn't have any access
to it. The Worldwide Web was more than a decade away,
(10:10):
so this was you know, this was early early days,
so ten was actually a significant number. Just I just
joke about it because I think of our discussion about
Twitter from a few weeks ago about how the five
thousand number was so small. But yeah, ten people. So
he just he convinces the university to allow them to
release this code to some other people, and they started
(10:31):
getting it installed in other universities in Finland first and
they joined on and then looked at other countries as well.
But there were some issues there right there, there were
a few like inter country connectivity issues apparently. Uh yeah,
because I mean at this point, again, internet is not
a real thing, right right, Yeah yeah. Yrkill remembers there
(10:55):
being specific problems connecting his his networks in Finland with
US networks, but this wouldn't go on for very long. Yeah. Yeah,
there were improvements in the infrastructure going on at the
same time as I r C starting to catch on
in popularity. In fact, by November of that year, of
universities in Colorado and Oregon would become connected to the
(11:18):
I r C network. Um they would set up their
own servers and and hook everything up together, so it
was no longer solely finished and what it was just
getting started. I couldn't help myself. UM and uh Jorco
had connected with some people through m I T S
network and distributed a couple of copies and it basically
(11:38):
just went wild. I mean like he did. He didn't
distribute it physically to all of these people that ended
up setting up their their their own versions. But yeah,
it's actually kind of funny, like the story about the
Colorado coming online. As I understand it, one of the
other UH universities in Finland there was a user who
was very interested in it, who then passed it on
(11:58):
to someone who was at in Colorado, who then uh,
you know, so it was it was growing organically. It
wasn't like a planned out this is how we're rolling
this out. It was it was a viral. Yeah. He
was just like, hey, check out the school thing that
I made, and and all of a sudden he would
see it pop up in other places. So that was
August to November. It took very little time at all.
(12:19):
By mid there were forty servers worldwide. Uh, and by
nineteen ninety the average number of active servers so forty
servers worldwide that not all of them are necessarily active
all the time. So by the number of active servers
and the number of active users at any particular given
time was still pretty modest. We're talking twelve users and
(12:41):
thirty eight servers. Granted, the original code for I r
C really only accounted for some hundred users to be
connected all at the same time. And uh. Furthermore, according
to some numbers around that same time, there were only
three million people worldwide who even had access to the Internet.
So right and and doing something like if you've ever
connected to a BBS in the old days. A lot
(13:02):
of those original bbs has only had capacity for a
couple of people to connect at a time. So for
something to have the capacity to allow a hundred people
to communicate simultaneously was a huge deal. It was it
would turn out to not be scalable really all, which
created many problems down the line. Yes. In fact, so
in August, that's when one of these problems starts to
(13:24):
rear its head, and that the I r C community
suffers its first schism, but not the last one. Hey, guys,
we'll chat some more about I r C in just
a moment, but first let's take a quick break. So
(13:44):
in this corner you have the traditional I C community,
and on the other corner you had a group that
just they you know, they didn't want people to tell
him what to do. They wanted they wanted freedom from
rules rules of four squares. Man, I don't know if
they actually used that voices, that's exactly how people talk
(14:07):
to I'm old enough to remember, I see. So So
these two groups split and the kind of anarchists, the
anarchists sort of side founded a net which stood in
fact for anarchist net. Yes, and the rest of it
became known as e f net, which stands for Aris
Free Network e r I s Aris Free network and
(14:28):
why because the server that a net was founded on
was named Aris dot Berkeley dot e d U. So,
in other words, you had one group of people who
are like, we kind of want the freedom to do
whatever we like, because we don't like these rules where
you say we can't do things like take over someone's
channel just because they weren't smart enough to block us
(14:48):
from and since they're not smart enough, they should not
be allowed to run that channel. I should be allowed
to run it and do whatever I want. I'm being
I'm certainly adding a little more motivation here than there
was probably in the literature. But that's kind of how
I do things. Well, I mean, you are you are
being snarky, But first of all, snark is what you do.
Snark is what both of us do. Snark is what
tech stuff does. We embrace it. We do. Um, but uh,
(15:12):
the folks who are on that that a net did
really enjoy exploiting um what was called nick colliding and
this is um. Yeah, so here's the thing, Like you
would choose a nickname when you log into a channel
or or a server to to chat with other people,
and this nickname represents who you are. You can choose
any nickname you want given the character limit of that
(15:35):
that's supported by that particular client and server. So one
thing that could happen is that if you try to
choose what you know, another person's nickname, the system would
generally prevent you from doing that, saying that that name
is already taken. But if you were able to orchestrate
an event or take advantage of an event where everyone
is kicked out of a room and then you rejoin
(15:56):
that room or channel, I should say, everyone's kicked out
of a channel, you rejoined that channel before the operator
or OP can join that channel, and you name yourself
the OPS name. You could end up giving yourself OP
powers for that channel, and you prevent the rightful OP
from being able to take hold. And so that's nick colliding.
It's when these nicknames collide. In One way that that
(16:17):
would happen is you would have what what's called a
net split. A net split is when uh you have
two servers that are connected to a network that are
running the same sort of channel, and some people are
on one server, some people are on the other server,
but they're all in the same chat room. But then
somehow a connection between those servers breaks and then you
(16:38):
end up having two instances of that same channel. So
you've got half the people in one and half the
people in the other. So let's say that I'm a jerk.
I mean, it's easy to say, right, So I'm a jerk.
I've lugged into the mansion. I'm hold on, it's gonna
take me a second. Yeah, I know, it's okay. There's
you're in the forest. There's a tree, all right. So Lauren,
you're an OP and I'm a and I've logged into
(17:01):
the channel and right now I'm not being too jerky,
so you haven't booted me or anything like that. But
there's a net split, and you and your group are
in one server. I'm on another server, so we're on
separate ones. I say, uh, there's been a net split.
I shall change my name, yes, exactly, I'll change my
name to Lauren's name. And so I changed my nickname.
And then when the servers are reunited and it tries
(17:24):
to reconcile these two worlds into one because you have
two people with the same nickname, the nicknames collide, thus
Nick colliding, and it boots both people out of the channel. Now,
because I'm a jerk, and because I've planned for this,
I've already got another window open, so i can log
right back in using Lauren's nickname again. And Lauren, because
she wasn't expecting this because she was being decent, is
(17:47):
locked out of her own channel. That's kind of nick
colliding in a you know, in a nutshell, and that's
the sort of stuff these guys like to do. So
they started up their own party. They say, well, you know,
the e f net people for some reason don't find
this nearly as entertaining as we do, so we're gonna
make our own party. However, a net would not last
very long, and in fact, most users chose to go
(18:10):
with e f net instead, saying this anarchy thing doesn't
sound like it's a lot of fun or very you know,
a productive does Everyone being nice seems to make a
lot more sense, right, So then we have a unified
network e f net again. So it started off as
a unified network, had that one schism, A net did
(18:32):
not last very long. We're back to unified. However, then
you have a second splintering, which is when some users
left e f net to form tub net, which was
mostly kind of a The tub net folks were saying, look,
you need to fix things so that net splits happen
less frequently. They are, they're disruptive, you, it's it's ruining
(18:55):
the experience, right. The way that people react to net
splits is not the problem. The fact that year having
net splits at all is something that really needs to
be worked on more exactly. And so it wasn't so
much a disagreement with policy as it was we need
to improve this platform. So they left and uh tough
net had about five servers and around a hundred users,
but it didn't stay around very long either. People kind
(19:18):
of might kind of reabsorbed. Yeah, um and and again,
basically all of these were really scalability issues, um, which
which Jerko himself actually listed as being just about the
only thing that he would go back and change if
he had it to all do over again. Right. But
you know, again, hindsight being twenty, it was a lot
harder to imagine this back when you were doing something
where you had ten people on absolutely so an event,
(19:41):
a world event happens that ends up making i r
C a very useful utility for a certain population. That
was when the Gulf War broke out and you started
seeing lots of people using i r C to communicate
about the war, sharing news stories, sharing information as they
got it because different parts of the world we're getting
reports earlier than other parts, and everyone wanted to know
(20:05):
what was going on. And this was when they were
seeing the height of their popularity in their early days.
And keep in mind, again we're talking modest numbers. So
when we tell you how many users at the higher
their popularity, don't snicker, right, because for the first time
in history, it was it was about three concurrent users
at any given moment, and that that was a big deal. Uh,
(20:25):
you know, kind of similar to how we were saying
in the Twitter episode about how how people were so
impressed by the ability that this that this software gave
them to tune into live reporting about an issue, same
same thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly, So it was you know, really,
to me, what this says is it's it's it's a
(20:46):
premonition about what the Internet will be and how it
will be important and how people will use it to
communicate these important ideas in real time. Across the entire globe,
and even though it was very tiny, particularly compared to
something as enormous as the Internet, it was kind of
a proof of concept in many ways. So then another
(21:07):
split happens, but this one was not It was an
amicable split. It wasn't something where a bunch of people
were really upset. A user who used the nickname wild
Thang and yes that is how it's spelled, created a
test network to develop bots. So these are automated accounts.
Often they will create admins that are bots, and the
(21:28):
admin bots really are just there to scan for anything
that would be objectionable and react to it so that
if someone's typing in all caps, the bot can step
in and say, please, don't type in all caps. People
were much more sensitive about that in these early days
of Internet. Yeah, you know, because it was considered shouting.
And no, no, I mean it's still considered shouting. But
it's kind of funny these days. I think back back then,
(21:49):
if you're if your handle is drunk hulk, it's hilarious.
Well but at any rate times yes, okay, that's fair.
It's not not always hilarious, but frequently so the this
this approach, this Uh, this split to create this area
where they could test out bots. It was really just
men as a testing ground, but more and more people
(22:11):
wanted to join it to kind of play around with
things and test things out and see what else was possible.
And that is how the undernet was born. And uh,
it actually had some really useful goals. It wasn't just
about playing with bots and seeing what you could program
to to do. It also involved ways of registering channels
(22:32):
to users so that nick colliding was less of a problem.
The idea being that if you register the channel to
a user and you had some form of verification like
a password, that would really cut down on people being
able to take over a channel without authorization. So it
actually exists in parallel with the f net. It's not
(22:52):
trying to compete or anything. It's just it's just kind
of a like almost like a sandbox where people can
test out things. And uh, that's where I r C
really stopped being a united network and becomes a platform
that runs on different networks. This is the first time
we start seeing something that can survive on its own
and doesn't. It's not just a flash in the pan,
you know. Splinter group, So by May, the i r
(23:17):
C protocol is made available to the general public. It's
no longer just something that's being spread from uh, you know,
one one enthusiast to another. Now it's available for anyone.
And the summer of nineteen Uh, we get a fork
in under net. So we've talked about splintering with e
f net. Now undernet itself forks and another group called
(23:40):
down net d a l n et is born and
it was really trying to bring more stability and security
to the i r C platform exactly. And a lot
of their their improvements were made by a guy named
Brian morpher Smith. So again looking to improve the platform. Uh.
(24:01):
I think these splits are looked upon with much more
fondness by people. You know, everyone was trying to make
it better as opposed to having having like deep philosophical
disagreements within the community. Uh. And then in undernet would
split again, but this time it was it was one
of those UM system problems, infrastructure problems. Uh. You see,
(24:23):
there was a server in Australia that was part of
the undernet, but connecting from Australia to the rest of
the world there was a lot of lag, so huge
delays you would type something in, you'd hit enter, it
would take you know, several seconds for it to to
transfer over. By then whatever, the topic of conversation has
changed dramatically. Everyone thinks that you're being either obtuse or
(24:47):
just really slow. But it turns us just because there's lag.
So there was a conscious decision to split from the
undernet UH and to create a new Australian based network
called oz org. So so this was again another one
of those beneficial splits that that was really done for
the good of the community rather than due to UH
(25:07):
inter community arguments. Exactly. Yeah, it's really I mean it was.
It was sad in a way because it meant that
the Australians became kind of you know, insulated from everybody
else and everyone else was denied the pleasure of Australian company.
But it was due specifically to technological you know, shortcomings
that had nothing to do with philosophical disagreements. Our next
(25:28):
item on the list, however, is very much one of
those angry philosophical disagreements. Yes, this is what is called
the Great Split, which you know, I've had a few
of those in bowling and they are really a pain.
But this happened in July of nine six. I r
c net splits off from e f net and uh
(25:49):
I are s net and e f net are are
still kind of like these odds. Yeah, there's so it
was over generally, it was over a disagreement on how
to handle operational issue, right. It was basically a culmination
of all of those old arguments over how NICK collisions
should be handled and over exactly how much power ops
(26:09):
and admins should have in their in their channels. It
was really to try and define these roles in different
ways because as it turns out, we'll talk about a
little bit a little bit later about how the definitions
of operators versus admins it's a little money depending upon
which service you're using, um. And also the capabilities that
ops and admins have are different depending upon you know,
(26:31):
the actual servers and clients that are being used. So
there were some disagreements and we ended up having the
split I r C net actually more out of coincidence
than planning. It wound up being I mean, I mean
cultural and geographical and and both of those. I mean,
there are a few servers that the jump ship one
way or another, but yeah, most of the ones in
(26:52):
I r C net are in Europe and Australia and Japan,
and most of the e F net ones are in
the US. So it ended up kind of just being
on that dividing line. It wasn't it wasn't like US
versus everybody else. It just kind of that's just kind
of how it shook out. And since then, multiple networks
have appeared running on I r C. So you had
(27:12):
this unified network, although it's very very tiny comparatively speaking. Uh,
and now that you have a bunch of separate networks.
At its height of popularity, which was a long time
ago in two thousand three, I r C had one
million users. As of January, that had dropped to about
four thousand, but it's still not terribly shabby and it's
(27:35):
still used quite a bit by a lot of I mean,
there are a lot of communities I go to where
I r C chat rooms are incorporated into the experience,
like like sites that do streaming video where they'll do
some forum a broadcast if they don't have a native
chat client that's part of that service. I r C
is the way that almost all of them go, and
(27:56):
that includes big names, like big companies all the way
to down too little independent operators because it's an open
source approach. We've got a little bit more to say
about i r C, but before we get to that,
let's take another quake break. Okay, so we're back, and
(28:18):
now i'd kind of like to talk about the hierarchy
of things that you know, like the people who are
on I r C, because before the break we mentioned
that there's a little bit of confusion in the ranks
of what an OP versus an ADMIN is and how
much control they have over what's going on. Right, So,
(28:39):
for one thing, operator is used by some services for
two different things. An operator might be a person who
has complete control of the server which has all the
stuff running on it, or just complete control over the
channel like a specific UH chat room exactly, so you
could have multiple channels on a single erver UH. And
(29:01):
then the operator is the person who could either be
in charge of everything or in charge of justice specific channel.
Another frequent term is admin that tends to be someone
who's in charge of a channel. So these are people
who have extra commands at their disposal beyond the ones
that any user has, and these commands allow you to
(29:22):
do lots of different things that make it useful, uh,
in order to have things run smoothly on your channel. So,
for instance, you can mute people, which is often useful
if someone is being particularly probably yeah, and you don't
want to just boot them and ban them, maybe you
mute them so that they don't even know that, Like,
they don't know that their stuff is not showing up,
(29:42):
so they're still typing wildly, but none of it's coming through, right,
so everyone else is blissfully ignorant. I mean sometimes that's
easier because you know, booting booting someone, which is another
thing they can do. They can kick people out of
a room, which generally speaking, booting does not disconnect you
from I r C, but it will disconnect you from
that channel. You often will then have either a ban
(30:04):
on the channel so you can't go back into it,
or um, you know, you can go back in, but
then the OP will give you a stern warning and
say if you do this, I will ban you from
the server, which means you don't you know, you don't
just get banned from the channel but the server itself. Uh. Now, granted,
there are ways around that if you're particularly trollish and
you want to take extra effort to really be a
pain in the patucas, but you know that's what the
(30:27):
mute buttons for. Also, you can do moderated discussions. So
a moderated discussion is where you have an admin who
picks who gets to talk. When this is really useful
if you wanted to do something like a question answer
session and you have someone who is addressing a group
of people and then wants to take in questions, but
you can't just be flooded by them, uh, and admin
(30:48):
may take on the role of moderator who then picks
the person who will ask the question in text and
in the person you know whoever's answering will then address that.
So that's also very useful. And there are other ends
as well. There's some UM confusion about what operators exactly
can cannot do. There are people who essentially ascribe them
godlike powers and they could do anything they wanted, and
(31:11):
that's not entirely true. There's some great UM resources on
i RC dot org if you want to go there
and check it out. There there's frequently ask question guides
that will answer everything, including one about what exactly cannon
op and can't and OP do to try and demystified
a little bit. It's an entertaining read, so I would
recommend it. So let's talk a little bit about them.
(31:32):
What's actually under the hood, How is this actually working?
This is where we get into the tech of the
tech stuff. And yeah, so it's open protocol. We mentioned
it earlier, and it relies on TCP. That's transmission controlled protocol, right,
And that's one of the two biggies that were created
by the Power Team events SURF and bob Con, the
(31:54):
other being i P, Y T c P, I P
are the big ones. You know, you probably have heard
them before. These are essentially the rules that create the
the traffic guidelines for data across networks. Well, without these rules,
computers wouldn't have a standardized approach to sending and receiving data,
and you wouldn't be able to have this incredible packet
(32:16):
switching network out there where you can send stuff across
the network and not worry if a computer or ten
computers or a hundred computers go down in the process
as long as whichever computer is the destination is still
active because it can reroute, so right, right, Although this
does mean that it's not technically part of the Worldwide
Web exactly. Of course, there are web based clients that
(32:39):
let you log into I r C. Right, yeah, you
want you don't necessarily these days need to download an
I r C client to your computer and then run
that as a separate program. Uh, for particular websites. Not
obviously you're not necessarily going to be able to visit
any channel anywhere. But you know, I was meant the
(33:00):
idea of that moderated discussion. Uh, So if you're going
to say a streaming site, I'll use a real example. So, um,
there's uh, there's a web podcast publication company called the
frog Pants Network run by a guy named Scott Johnson.
He does a lot of really funny podcasts. He streams
his podcasts live, he records somebody streams them live, and
(33:23):
he invites people to come into this chat room and
participate in a discussion. So, uh, that would allow you.
You go to the website where the the video is streaming,
and just underneath it is this little web based I
r C client and all you do is type in
whatever nickname you want to use and hit enter, and
then away you go, and you can make as many
goofy jokes as you like, which Scott uh encourages that's
(33:47):
the kind of world he lives, and I appreciate it
so anyway that that's an example. But yes, it's it
itself is not part of the world Wide Web. It
predates the World Wide Web, so that's important to him. Member,
And you know, I know that most people these days
have a grasp on that. I just remember a time
when Worldwide Web and Internet were synonymous to most people,
(34:09):
Like you know, if they thought of the Internet, they
were thinking Worldwide Web. They weren't They didn't realize that email, FTP,
all these other protocols are also part of it, right
right then they existed in layers, yes, exactly. So to
log in, like we said, you'd launch that client an appy,
and you would direct it to the appropriate server because
there are different ones. Like you, if you've got an app,
(34:30):
that's just all it is is just running this program.
It needs to know where you're where to point it,
like you have to tell it there are many different
servers that I might have access to. And then once
you got to that server, then you would have to
try and you know, find the right channel. You might
look through a list of channels and designate the specific
one you want to join. You could join multiple channels
and then switch between them so that you're part of
(34:51):
multiple conversations all at the same time. And some servers,
depending on which one you have logged into, UM might
ask you to create a user name and even a password. Yeah,
so instead of just coming in under a nickname, because
some of them will just assign you a random string
like a nine digit number. Right, I feel like like
you are web visitors eight seven b Q four. Well,
(35:12):
that's a great catchy name. But you can also designate
your your nickname or user name, and like like Lauren said,
some of them will also allow you to create a
password which will protect your nickname so that no one
else can have it. From that. From that, right that
nick duplication thing, which usually only works on some of
them are server wide, but a lot of them are
just channel specific. So in other words, there could be
(35:34):
someone in another channel posing as you and being a
total jerk. Uh. That's my excuse for having multiple personalities
on an I r C server where one of me
is really friendly and one of me is not. I'm complex.
So since it's a client server architecture and it's not
on this distributed network, that's where you are able to,
(35:55):
you know, access lots of different stuff, but only the
stuff that's available on that server. Like we were saying earlier,
if there are channels that you want to visit, but
that server doesn't host those channels, you're out of luck.
I mean, you create a channel maybe if you have
the permissions to do that, but you might not be
in with all of your buddies, similar to like like
World Warcraft or something like that. You have to all
(36:16):
join up in the same right to play the same game, right,
because those servers have a limitation on how much they
can support and once you reach that, that's it. So
uh yeah, it's you know, that's also where the the
net split thing comes into play, because if you do
have multiple servers connected together that are running the same
channel and they split, that's where you get that problem
is talking about earlier, where the actual audience splits up
(36:39):
and you end up with talking to just a fraction
of the room. Right, Although the servers can be connected together, Yeah, yeah,
you can connect a lot of them together. That's where
you know, that was the whole idea behind the original
I r C network. It's just it's funny because if
you look at I r C today, you wouldn't think
of it as starting as a unified network because there's
so many different servers and networks out there. So today
(37:02):
it just looks like it was something that grew into
like it started out as islands all growing separately, but
in fact it was one land mass that later broke
into separate islands. But but yeah, but you can you
can connect those islands back to one another retroactively these
days if you want to. If an OP wants to
give his or her users access to a greater number
(37:25):
of channels, sure, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, as
long as you're all running the same I r C
server software, you're you're good to go. Once in a while,
like we said, you get those broken connections, that's a bummer.
And also lag is an issue. Um, there are times
where lag will be a particular problem and you find
it frustrating to communicate. There's an actual command slash ping
(37:49):
that will tell you how long the delay is between
when you type something in and when it respond When
how long it takes a message to go from the
server and from the server back to you. You can
also ping other users to find out how long it
takes for a message to go from you to that
person and from the person back to you. So that way,
if you're doing these little private messages off to the side,
(38:09):
you know, if someone's not responding to you and maybe
because they just they're they're lagging, Yeah, you can understand
whether you have in fact lost connection or if there's
a leg or or if they're just ignoring you. Yes,
like if you get the instead of a lag message,
it just says I'm washing my hair. Just take the
hint because I don't have hair. Guys, I tell you
(38:30):
I'm washing my hair, it just means I don't want
to talk anyway. So if you listen to that episode
we talked about earlier, we go into a lot more
detail about the different commands that are available to your
basic user and explained that why you know, the ones
that you might find on one version, like the undernet,
are different than e F net, that are different than
(38:51):
I r C Net, because like we said, these all
evolved separately once they split off from each other, and
you know, it's been all several decades since they were
for introduced. Yeah, yeah, I find that I find it
really interesting that it all of this time has passed,
and that it is still in use, perhaps not widely
in use now that there are many other options that
are pretty widely populated. But Jarko himself once once said
(39:16):
in a talk with the Undernet Public Relations Committee, Um,
what makes I r C special is a sense of anonymity.
The only things that you often know of the other
person are those that you can conclude from the discussions. Right, So,
for example, you may conclude that they have a shared
interest in a particular topic, assuming that they are being
genuine when they joined that that channel, because you know trolls, sure,
(39:41):
but but but other other than that, you know, it's
it's not like this is linked to your Facebook or
your Twitter or other personally identifiable information. You don't even
necessarily have to use a user name that you're going
to put in use anywhere else on the Internet. Right,
you might be able, you might feel more free to
express thoughts that you otherwise would feel would be uh,
(40:01):
you'd be judged upon, you know, not not even in
a trollish way, I mean just being honest and upfront.
And maybe maybe you're looking for friends who can support
you in something that you don't really feel comfortable talking
to the folks around you. I mean that happens, so
it certainly has a valuable place. And like I said,
I still use I r C. I mean, I still
(40:21):
uh joined these conversations. There are shows that I have
been a guest on that have used I r C
chat rooms. I love having that available and seeing what
the live audience is saying during the show. Usually there's
a lag of about you know, ten seconds or so
between what what we do on the video and when
people see it and are able to respond to it.
(40:42):
So but it's still I mean, if a good show
that does this, they'll actually incorporate user responses and and
they call people out and and and you know, give
them credit or or you know, shame them publicly, depending
upon the the appropriate response. But it's it's one of
those things that enriches Internet experience. Absolutely. Yeah. I have
(41:02):
very fond memories of it from um probably about two
thousand four to two eight, I think is when I
was using m I r C, which is the Microsoft
client for it. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic
episode of tech Stuff. If you have any suggestions for
future topics I should cover, let me know the best
way to do that. Is to hop over to Twitter
and use the handled text stuff h s W I'll
(41:24):
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.