Filipino Programmer | Philippines

Remember your IRC days? Have you ever thought who might have created IRC which is one of the most popular chat servers/client today? 1988 was the birth of a new way of communication called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The developer of this first internet chat network is Jarkko Oikarinen. Born on August 16, 1967, he first wrote the first client/server application when he was working on University of Olulu, Finland. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.

When IRC first started regularly hosting users, Oikarinen asked some friends at Tampere University of Technology and Helsinki University of Technology to start running IRC servers to distribute the load. Other universities joined soon after. Markku Järvinen made the client program more usable by including support for Emacs editor commands, and before long IRC was in use across Finland on the Finnish network FUNET, and then on the Scandinavian network NORDUNET.

Oikarinen then got an account on the well-known machine “ai.ai.mit.edu” at the university MIT, from which he recruited the first IRC user outside Scandinavia, Mike Jacobs, and gave the IRC software to Vijay Subramaniam. Subramaniam passed the software to his friends Jeff Trim at the University of Denver and David Bleckmann and Todd Ferguson at Oregon State University, who began running IRC on their machines “orion.cair.du.edu” and “jacobcs.cs.orst.edu” respectively. They emailed Jarkko and obtained connections to the Finnish IRC network to create transatlantic connection, and the number of IRC servers began to grow rapidly across both North American and Europe.

IRC became well known to the general public around the world in 1991, when its use skyrocketed as users logged on to get up-to-date information on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, through a functional IRC link into the country that stayed operational for a week after radio and television broadcasts were cut off. Archived logs of this famous IRC event can be found here.

Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarkko_Oikarinen
www.kumpu.org/
www.irc.org/history_docs/jarkko.html

Bookmark This!