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Before the Web · Era 2 · Into the Internet

1988–2026an open protocol with no single owner: not sold and not…

IRC

Internet Relay Chat

A chat system that a student in Oulu, Finland wrote in 1988 as an upgrade for the chat program on a student BBS, and that accidentally became the world's first open real-time network: the Gulf War, the coup in Moscow, thirty-eight years of history with no single owner. Alive in 2026 as well, though many times smaller than at its peak in 2005.

Founders Jarkko Oikarinen (University of Oulu, Finland)
Domains irc.org · libera.chat · efnet.org
chatprotocolopen-sourcecommunityreal-time

In brief

IRC is a chat protocol that Jarkko Oikarinen, a student at the University of Oulu in Finland, wrote at the end of August 1988 simply to improve the chat program on the university bulletin board. Nobody had a plan to build infrastructure for real-time news, yet two and a half years later IRC turned out to be the place where people followed live reports on the Gulf War, and a few months after that a relay of Western television news about the August coup in Moscow. The protocol belongs to nobody, so it can be neither bought nor shut down, and the only thing that can be done is to break up one of the networks inside it, which is what happened to Freenode in 2021. In 2026 IRC is still alive: smaller than at the peak of 2005, but not zero.

How it started (the founders)

Jarkko Oikarinen, known by the nick WiZ, spent the summer of 1988 as a student on a summer internship and at the same time as the sysop of the university bulletin board OuluBox, a BBS rare for its time in that you could reach it both by modem and directly over the internet. OuluBox already ran a group chat, MUT (MultiUser Talk), written by his friend Jukka Pihl. Oikarinen decided to improve it and, using pieces of code from another friend, Jyrki Kuoppala, and from Pihl himself, wrote the first version of the IRC client and server. He states the motivation himself with no drama at all: "I decided to improve the multiuser chat system for OuluBox and IRC was the result of that effort." The first version took, by his own account, a month or two, depending on how you count.

The exact date of birth did not survive even in the author's own memory, and all that is known is that it was the end of August 1988. After that, events sped up unusually fast for an era without viral marketing: already in November 1988 IRC went beyond Oulu, and in 1989 Oikarinen got access to the machine ai.ai.mit.edu at MIT, not for the sake of a server but for shell access, in order to talk to people; there he found the first user outside Scandinavia, Mike Jacobs, who connected to IRC through OuluBox without a server of his own, and met Vijay Subramaniam, who passed IRC on to Jeff Trim at Denver and to David Bleckmann and Todd Ferguson at Oregon State. They were the ones who brought up the first servers outside Scandinavia, rather than Oikarinen through MIT, as the previous version of this dossier had it. By the middle of 1989, less than a year after the start, about 40 IRC servers were running in the world.

Year-by-year timeline

Lesser-known but significant facts

  1. OuluBox, the BBS predecessor of IRC, was a rarity for 1988: you could reach it both by modem and directly over the internet, so IRC grew from the very beginning at the junction of two worlds, the dial-up one and the networked one.
  2. The Gulf War channel was literally called "+war," and not "#report" or "#gulf" as it is sometimes remembered after the fact; that is the old IRC channel syntax with a "+" prefix instead of a hash.
  3. RFC 1459 itself records a tenfold growth of the IRC audience over the two years before publication, which means the real explosive growth came not in 1988–1989 but precisely in 1991–1993, after the Gulf War.
  4. Freenode grew out of a single Linux support channel. Rob Levin ("lilo") started #linuxneo on EFnet on January 29, 1994; the channel survived moves to Undernet and DALnet before turning in 1998 into a separate network, Open Projects Network, the future Freenode.
  5. The last word of a departing Freenode operator in 2021 fit into the title of a single page: "freenode now belongs to Andrew Lee, and I'm leaving for a new network."
  6. IRC did not arise in a vacuum, because it had a direct prototype. Oikarinen himself names Bitnet Relay Chat, an earlier chat system on top of the academic network Bitnet, as his source of inspiration; the first IRC server was called tolsun.oulu.fi.

Legend vs. the record

The first growth lever

The lever was not the chat itself but the fact that the source code of the IRC server was simply available to anyone who wanted it, with no license and no central registry of servers. Oulu → Denver → Oregon State was not a marketing funnel but a chain of people who one after another took the code and brought up their own node, because they could. In 11 months the network grew from one Finnish server to 40 nodes around the world, without a single dollar spent on promotion. The world events of 1991 did not create this growth mechanism; they landed on top of it, because the open federation already existed, and one and the same bot pattern of relaying news worked on the Gulf War and later on the coup. The same lever worked six years later on a smaller scale: Freenode grew from a single Linux support channel (1994) into the 20th largest network in the world (1998–2002) by the same logic, because an open protocol allowed growth without permission.

Parallels today (projects from the catalog)

What a builder can take from this in 2026

  1. An open protocol with no single owner survives any conflict with the team. IRC survived four splits and the collapse of Freenode (2021) and is still alive 38 years later: a split destroys a node or a network, not the protocol itself.
  2. Do not build a product for news; build a product for real-time conversation, and the news will find the channel by itself. IRC was prepared neither for the Gulf War nor for the coup, and the only thing that was ready was the fact that live people were already there on the line.
  3. A change of owner of the brand or the domain is more dangerous than a technical failure. Freenode did not break technically in May 2021; it was dismantled by disputed admin access and one foreign logo on the site. If growth rests on trust in the community, legal ownership of the infrastructure is worth separating from the personality of the leader from the first day.
  4. A ready migration plan is a competitive advantage, not insurance on paper. Libera.Chat entered the world's top 10 networks in a matter of days not because of better technology but because an open standard let it bring up a copy at once and take the users away with a single announcement.
  5. A product does not have to grow in order to stay valuable. IRC has lost most of its audience from the peak of 2005, yet more than 200,000 people still choose it every day in 2026 with no marketing budget: this is not a zombie product but infrastructure that has found the permanent size of its niche.

Discrepancies and what we could not verify

Sources (primary first)

Secondary (context, cross-checking):

The same thing, about today

The same breakdowns, but of projects launching right now: what the product is, where the first users came from, how they charge. The card is free, the full dossier is $5 (the dossier itself is written in Russian).

Browse the dossier catalog →