Categories: Internet/Intranets

Continued from ALTERNATIVES TO IRC

IRC is like a Usenet group on stimulants. Communication is fast, brevity is essential, and the entire experience takes on the atmosphere of a large party in a big house: conversations going on in different places and people drifting in and out of them, or even trying to carry on several at the same time. Of course, IRC suffers from some of Usenet's problems as well--harassment, flaming, stupidity, addiction, people who won't shut up, and all the rest--but if you're awake in the middle of the night and want some conversation, an IRC channel is your answer.

What's it actually like to chat? Basically, you spend your time in one or more windows, each representing a different channel or user. The window is split into two panes: the viewing area and the composing area. You read the incoming messages in the viewing area, and you type your own messages in the composing area. Unlike Talk, in which you can watch people type character-by-character, IRC isn't quite real-time. What you type doesn't appear until you press the Enter key or click the Send button, so you have a chance to edit what you'll send. In practice, however, users dash off a comment, question, or reply, then send it quickly for the sake of staying with the conversation.

IRC takes some getting used to, simply because messages appear in the channel's window in the order in which the server turns them around. If you ask a question--say, "Did anyone catch the Top Ten list on Letterman last night?"--it's entirely possible that 20 or more messages will fly by before a response to yours appears in the viewing window. It's as if you were trying to carry on a conversation with someone at the other end of a large and boisterous family dinner table and you had lost the ability to tune out other conversations. You hear everything, all the time. Hence the need for individual messaging--and the creation of new channels.

Just as interesting is that users don't usually go by their real names. When you connect to a server, you're asked to provide a nickname, and you can call yourself whatever you want. There can be any number of people going by the name John or Roboto or Xena or whatever (although some IRC networks allow you to "own" a specific nickname), and things can quickly get confusing. You can change your nickname at any time with the /NICK command.

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Published as Internet Tools in the 05/27/97 issue of PC Magazine.