TechStuff Classic: Time for an IRC 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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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,

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

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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, 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 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

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 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 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

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. 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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.

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 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 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.