| In the early days of the internet the only way for users to talk to each other in real time was through a Unix program called
"Talk". Talk had a horizontally split screen. Keystrokes typed by one user appeared on the top, while keystrokes typed by a
second user on the same system appeared on the bottom half of the screen. It was awkward to say the least... every pause,
every typo and its correction, was visible to the other party.
In 1988 a young university student in Oslo, named Jarkko Oikarinen, was assigned the project of creating a better system that
would allow multiple users to talk to each other over the internet. Jarkko invented Internet Relay Chat. His system was also
based in unix, but it created "channels" for streaming conversation that users could tap into, or "join". Type a sentence into
an input box, hit enter, your text would be sent to a channel and all others in that channel would see it.
The system was just the solution for small groups of people - twenty at most - to hold meetings online. Perfect for the
university IT departments that set up small IRC servers, and when some of those servers linked to each other, the first IRC
network was born. The rest, is history.
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