WTF ?

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing.^[1] It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels,^[2] but also allows one-to-one communication via private message^[3] as well as chat and data transfers via Direct Client-to-Client.^[4]
As of May 2009, the top 100 IRC networks served more than half a million users at a time, with hundreds of thousands of channels (the vast majority of which stand mostly vacant), operating on a total of roughly 1,500 servers worldwide.^[5]
IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox in Finland. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.^[6]
IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt throughout a media blackout.^[7] It was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War.^[8] Logs of these and other events are kept in the ibiblio archive.^[9]
IRC client software is available for virtually every computer operating system that supports TCP/IP networking.