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>3. Brief History of IRC</H1
><P
>The first IRC daemon was written in the summer of 1998 by Jarkko
"WiZ" Oikarinen of the University of Oulu, Finland. Originally intended
as a BBS-style replacement for Talk, IRC quickly spread; first through
Scandinavian, and then throughout the rest of the world. Within a year
there were over 40 servers linked up.</P
><P
>At this stage there was only one network, and so a name
unnecessary - it was simply 'IRC'; but as the size of the network grew,
disagreements began to form. IRC was a pretty chaotic medium with
netsplits, nick collisions, and channel takeovers all commonplace; and
it was inevitable that at some stage users would split off to form their
own networks.</P
><P
>One of the first major splits was in 1992, when Wildthang created
the Undernet network. Originally intended as a test network, Undernet
quickly grew, gaining a reputation as a friendly network due to it's
introduction of services to protect users and channels.</P
><P
>Two years later, Undernet itself forked, the new networking
becoming DALnet. DALnet's founder, dalvenjah, took Undernet's concept of
services to a new level, introducing support for nick registration,
G-lines, and a host of other features.</P
><P
>Meanwhile on IRCnet (as the original IRC network was now known),
feelings where running high. IRCnet was opposed to the concept of
channel/nick 'ownership' which Undernet and DALnet had introduced, but
clearly something had to be done about the constant channel takeovers
that were occuring. Two alternative ideas were proposed: nick/channel
delay, and timestamping (see http://www.irc-help.org for information),
but there was bitter dispute over which to implement.</P
><P
>In July of 1996, IRCnet split, with most of the North American
servers leaving to form EFnet, leaving IRCnet as a mostly European
network.</P
><P
>Since then, hundreds of other smaller networks have formed, most
using modified versions of either DALnet, EFnet, IRCnet, or Undernet's
ircd.</P
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