IRC then grew larger and got used on the entire Finnish national network- FUNET-and then connected to Nordunet, the Scandinavian branch of the Internet. They had obtained the program from one of Oikarinen's friends, Vijay Subramaniam-the first non-Finnish person to use IRC. They had their own IRC network running and wanted to connect to the Finnish network. Oikarinen got in touch with people at the University of Denver and Oregon State University. At this time Oikarinen realized that the rest of the BBS features probably wouldn't fit in his program. Oikarinen got some friends at the Helsinki University and Tampere University to start running IRC servers when his number of users increased and other universities soon followed. Jyrki Kuoppala pushed Oikarinen to ask Oulu University to free the IRC code so that it also could be run outside of Oulu, and after they finally got it released, Jyrki Kuoppala immediately installed another server. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET. The first IRC network was running on a single server named.

The first part he implemented was the chat part, which he did with borrowed parts written by his friends Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features. IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science. As of June 2021, there are 481 different IRC networks known to be operating, of which the open source Libera Chat, founded in May 2021, has the most users, with 20,374 channels on 26 servers between them, the top 100 IRC networks share over 100 thousand channels operating on about one thousand servers. In April 2011, the top 100 IRC networks served more than half a million users at a time. IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60 percent of its users. Examples of programs used to connect include Mibbit, IRCCloud, KiwiIRC, and MIRC. Users connect using a client, which may be a web app, a standalone desktop program, or embedded into part of a larger program.

Users connect to an IRC server, which may be part of a larger IRC network. The chat process works on a client–server networking model. Internet Relay Chat is implemented as an application layer protocol to facilitate communication in the form of text. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat ( instant messaging) system. The first IRC server,, a Sun-3 server on display near the University of Oulu computer centre

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