IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an ancient Internet service that provides the ability to instantly send and receive short messages. The text-only Internet Relay Chat chat system was first developed in 1988 by a Finnish IT guy named Jarkko Oikarinen. His chat nickname was Wiz.
Oikarinen could not have known at the time how much his creation would impact the lives of people around the world. From then until today, in some cases, IRC has become one of the main communication tools for various groups on the Internet. 
In Greece, IRC (IRC) became known in the mid-1990s, when the Internet began to develop in our country.
One of the first (if not the first) IRC server owners was GRnet (Greek IRC Network). It was created in 1995 by 8 people with the aim of uniting all Greeks and continues to exist to this day.
To celebrate IRC's 30th birthday, we'll describe how we discovered this service years ago.
Initially, we looked at various applications for connecting to IRC. Today, there are many IRC clients available, but we will mention three main ones:
mIRC: https://www.mirc.com GUI application for Windows
X-Chat: https://www.xchat.org GUI application for Windows and Linux and
BitchX: https://www.bitchx.org command line application for Linux
Large and popular servers (networks) available at that time were Efnet and Linknet. The innovation of the latter at that time was that it had SSL connections.
We had to discover from scratch how you could create your own channel #mychannel, how you could lock it and how you could encrypt it with blowfish.
Later we learned to write scripts to connect the IRC channel to an FTP server, or to a Website.
The results were amazing. Every new publication from the www automatically appeared via a bot in the IRC channel.
But first we had to create the bot, put it in the channel and on the website or FTP server that we were interested in with Eggdrop. IRC bots are written in C that uses Tcl as a scripting language.
Then we had to make the bot smarter so that it could respond to commands like: /msg botname latest
So after our experiments with the chat in the box offered by the above servers we decided to try our luck by installing our own irc server.
So on a Dutch server (CentOS) that we had from Leaseweb we installed the UnrealIRCd software.
It was our first irc server. Then of course we started adding things for more security, closing doors and banning IPS at the server level. The above was not at all pleasant, as the more people created channels on our server, the more there were the cunning ones who tried various things.
It should be noted that IRC is also used maliciously. For example, an IRC channel can be used to control a botnet, carry out DDoS attacks, and various other things.
All of the above, however, seems to have passed away irrevocably with chat services like Slack, applications like Skype and many others that are available today.
The nostalgia for all of the above, however, comes with the awareness that encryption has left our hands (at least at the server level) and has passed to the companies that provide the services and applications.
Happy Birthday Internet Relay Chat!
- History of IRC from the Greek Wikipedia
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