N-2-3-030.63 Internet Relay Chat by Kenji Rikitake [In response to the omission of any description of the IRC Internet service in the last issue of Internet Society News, Kenji Rikatake volunteered the following overview for which I am grateful. -ed] IRC, Internet Relay Chat, was first invented by a Finnish hacker Jarkko Oikarinen in 1989. IRC is a truly distributed chat system, and the IRC program installed on an INET'93 host tells me now that the IRC server of ucsd.edu recognizes 1288 users, 518 channels, 70 operators are on 141 different servers as of 11:54 PDT today (19 Aug). One of the impressive role IRC was played was during the Gulf War in 1991 - a "news" channel opened to broadcast up-to-date information of what happened in the Gulf, mostly about the U.S. Desert Storm operation. I usually talk on IRC in Japanese using ISO-2022-JP defined in RFC1482, and a GNU-Emacs-based client software called irchat.el. Quite a few volunteers are maintaining IRC server-level network in Japan, and Takahiro Kikuchi , one of them, has invented a perl script called pirc, which acts as a robot while you are out and records everything happens on IRC channels. Another Japanese-specific movement on IRC is that lots of Japanese-speaking students have formed a channel called "#nippon", and it's an informal information exchange line provides a place of relief to many Japanese studying abroad. The channel is also open to people in Japan, so it also acts as a trans-Pacific information exchange. You can also find many other ethnic-based channels on IRC.