Can We Chat?
IRC offers the most immediate way to communicate over the Internet
By Neil Randall
Everybody uses e-mail, and most Internet users have been on Usenet newsgroups or visited the forums in CompuServe or AOL. But despite the strengths of these technologies, they share one major limitation: They're not real-time. E-mail and Usenet are messaging systems, and although they can approximate the feel of conversation at times, they lack the true spontaneity of live interaction. In some ways, that can be an advantage--people can compose and read messages as their schedules allow--but we all know that sitting around a table talking with one another has a lot of advantages, too.
Enter Internet Relay Chat, better known as IRC, or more recently as Live Chat or just Chat. Originally designed by Jarkko Oikarinen in Finland in 1988, IRC has developed into an increasingly popular Internet activity. Lending emphasis to its popularity are Microsoft's development of Internet Chat Server (www.ms-normandy.com) for its Internet Information Server 3.0 and Netscape's deal with IChat (www.ichat.com) to provide Chat services directly through the Navigator browser. Microsoft also offers two Chat clients, V-Chat and Comic Chat, and Netscape includes a Chat client in the Power Pack 2.0 add-on to Navigator (www.netscape.comcomprod/power_pack_summary.html). This isn't to suggest that Microsoft and Netscape offer the only solutions--in fact, they're quite late to the party with this technology--but the fact that the biggies have noticed shows pretty convincingly that IRC has made its mark and is here to stay.
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Published as Internet Tools in the 05/27/97 issue of PC Magazine.
