Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And it is Friday.
Speaker 1: That means it is that it's time for a classic episode.
Speaker 1: And this episode originally published on March two thousand and fourteen.
Speaker 1: It is titled time for an I r C Chat.
Speaker 1: I hope you guys enjoy. Let's listen. In long time
Speaker 1: listeners of tech Stuff might be thinking, we already did
Speaker 1: an episode on I r C, and you are completely correct.
Speaker 1: Jonathan and Chris did one of those way back on
Speaker 1: June called what is I r C? But it was
Speaker 1: it was more of a basic overview of what the
Speaker 1: service is and how it came about and how people
Speaker 1: use it. We wanted to go a little bit more
Speaker 1: into the history of I r C. Thanks Mo Splee
Speaker 1: to an idea from listener Addie Um that's at Addie
Speaker 1: cyrom One on Twitter, who said, can you do an
Speaker 1: episode on I r C? And we said sure, yeah.
Speaker 1: I just want to make it clear that I listened
Speaker 1: to that podcast from and I have no memory of
Speaker 1: ever saying those words, and I it sounds like I'm
Speaker 1: making a joke, but I was, like I, I clearly
Speaker 1: recognized my voice, but there is nothing in my brain
Speaker 1: that held onto the fact that I did an episode
Speaker 1: about I r C already. So we if you did
Speaker 1: listen to that episode and you have a better memory
Speaker 1: than I do, some of this might sound familiar, but
Speaker 1: go with us, all right, So let's start our our
Speaker 1: journey down memory lane, and and also open up a
Speaker 1: few other doors on the way if I can make
Speaker 1: some metaphors. So what exactly is I r C. Well,
Speaker 1: as we have mentioned even just in the past couple
Speaker 1: of minutes, here, it stands for Internet Relay check Weight.
Speaker 1: I have no memory, Jonathan, this is becoming a problem.
Speaker 1: I know that you're off caffeine today. Better it might
Speaker 1: be the issue. Yeah, I gave up caffeine and now
Speaker 1: now I'm all sorts of messed up, y'all. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's actually a platform for real time chat on
Speaker 1: the Internet. And it's text based. It's not you know,
Speaker 1: voice or video or anything like that. This is actually
Speaker 1: typing in your little type type. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: type of instant messenger. Might be a phrase that people
Speaker 1: are more familiar with these days, although I would argue
Speaker 1: that most instant messengers are probably based on I r C. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I r C is also group based, as opposed to
Speaker 1: a one on one discussion. You would It's almost like
Speaker 1: if you were to go to a physical location where
Speaker 1: the people at a physical location are all all interested
Speaker 1: in a particular topic, and you walk through the door
Speaker 1: and you join the conversation. Except in I r C
Speaker 1: you can actually be in multiple rooms at the same time,
Speaker 1: having multiple conversations about multiple topics, right, because you're going
Speaker 1: through a server. Yeah, a server that has multiple different
Speaker 1: kind of rooms, virtual rooms, or or channels exactly. And
Speaker 1: each channel has its own name. Uh. Most of the time,
Speaker 1: the channel name kind of gives you an idea of
Speaker 1: what the subject is some of them. Some of them
Speaker 1: are general subjects. They're pretty straightforward. It's uh, yeah, like
Speaker 1: hashtag firefly fans. I guess that would be people who
Speaker 1: really enjoy bugs that light up at night. That clearly
Speaker 1: must be it to to connect to these kind of spaces,
Speaker 1: you have to use a program, a client, an app YEP.
Speaker 1: So you've got this client server relationship the servers what
Speaker 1: houses the connections, and the client is what you use
Speaker 1: to have your computer connect to the server. And these
Speaker 1: days there are many much clients, yeah, and lots and
Speaker 1: lots of servers too, So the clients exist for all
Speaker 1: sorts of different operating systems. So you're not going to
Speaker 1: be left out, you know, if you're if you're saying,
Speaker 1: but I use a Mac, how could I participate in
Speaker 1: this wonderful world that is I r C. First of all,
Speaker 1: I'd say, well, you're about a decade late to this party,
Speaker 1: more than a decade later, it turns out. But also
Speaker 1: I would say, don't worry, because every operating system has
Speaker 1: a host of clients you can choose from. Many have
Speaker 1: very different capabilities that are built in. Some of them
Speaker 1: are more intuitive than others. And there are also lots
Speaker 1: and lots of servers on them. And UH. The other
Speaker 1: interesting things is that the servers can connect to each
Speaker 1: other to form networks. And in fact, that's how I
Speaker 1: r C got started. It started with an a network originally, UH,
Speaker 1: and then eventually reached the world that we're in today
Speaker 1: where you have all these different servers UH and networks
Speaker 1: that some of them are not connected to each other.
Speaker 1: So in other words, there may be channels on one
Speaker 1: server that you really like and channels on another server
Speaker 1: that you really like. Those two servers aren't connected, so
Speaker 1: you have to connect to either one separately in order
Speaker 1: to access the stuff that you want exactly. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not like you can just jump from channel to channel
Speaker 1: if those servers have no connection between them. And uh
Speaker 1: so it's meant for, like we said, group discussions, you know,
Speaker 1: having a big group conversation. There are ways that you
Speaker 1: can send private message is went forth um, and to communicate,
Speaker 1: you just type your text into a little text field.
Speaker 1: Think of a divided window. So the window on the
Speaker 1: top is sort of the ongoing conversation within that channel,
Speaker 1: and the window below, it's very narrow, is really a
Speaker 1: text field for you to type in. And then you
Speaker 1: can also enter in commands I r C commands. We
Speaker 1: talked a lot about I r C commands in the
Speaker 1: two thousand ten episode, so I highly recommend you go
Speaker 1: and check that out if you're really interested. For one thing,
Speaker 1: the commands are dependent upon what client you use because
Speaker 1: the different systems use slightly different phrasing. Yeah, just imagine that,
Speaker 1: you know, think of it as evolution, and at one
Speaker 1: point all these different client philosophies split and then evolved
Speaker 1: on their separate pathways, which is actually exactly what happens,
Speaker 1: which we will talk about. Yeah, so that's the basic
Speaker 1: way that these things work. So so let's talk about
Speaker 1: how this actually came to happen. It all started way
Speaker 1: back in y'all when when we mentioned that you are
Speaker 1: or twenty years too late, we were not really kidding
Speaker 1: um and and for the record, on all of this
Speaker 1: history stuff that we're about to talk about, there are
Speaker 1: a bunch of vaguely conflicting reports about all of it
Speaker 1: because no one was really documenting it at the time.
Speaker 1: No one was expecting this to be something that someone
Speaker 1: would be sitting in a podcast room talking about. It's
Speaker 1: It's the way a lot of things unfold eventually is
Speaker 1: that unless there was someone who was officially a chronicler,
Speaker 1: uh you just get you know, kind of time is estimations. So,
Speaker 1: for example, the birth of I. R. C Is often
Speaker 1: said to be sometime around the end of August nine,
Speaker 1: but we don't remember what the day was because the
Speaker 1: operative person um one yarco a k A whiz Karen,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go I think it's I. I think it's okay.
Speaker 1: So here's the thing, guys, he's finished. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of Finnish people involved in the development of I
Speaker 1: r C, and we are Americans who have a vast
Speaker 1: ignorance on the way to pronounce Finish names. Lauren has
Speaker 1: done her best to to decipher this. I have not,
Speaker 1: and hilarity shall ensue. Now. I want to extend all
Speaker 1: my apologies to my Finnish friends who are going to
Speaker 1: cringe every time I mangle a name. But just no,
Speaker 1: it's not at a malice. It's just from ignorance. Yea
Speaker 1: yea ignorance um. But so at any rate, he was
Speaker 1: working at the University of Aulu in Finland, and he
Speaker 1: was working specifically in the Department of Information Processing Science,
Speaker 1: and he thought, you know, I want to include some
Speaker 1: sort of chat functionality in this BBS service software that
Speaker 1: I am installing BBS bulletin board system. So this is
Speaker 1: sort of the predecessor to you know, these were like
Speaker 1: those those local networks that you could log into. It
Speaker 1: wasn't an Internet, it was something that you could dial
Speaker 1: directly into a BBS and get a net like uh services,
Speaker 1: including things like messaging an email, but it was usually
Speaker 1: restricted just to that BBS. So in other words, again
Speaker 1: it was they were like little islands as opposed to
Speaker 1: a global internet. Yeah, there was usenet, which was a
Speaker 1: little bit more expansive and had more group discussion kind
Speaker 1: of functions. But but one of the ideas that Yorko
Speaker 1: had was that he really wanted to to integrate that
Speaker 1: into a real time chat capacity, right, and he started
Speaker 1: looking around for inspiration u and one of them was
Speaker 1: a bit chat client that was developed by a friend
Speaker 1: of his. He actually started borrowing parts of multi user
Speaker 1: chat programs that were written by other people, including then
Speaker 1: tell me if I get this one wrong, or key
Speaker 1: yes your key, I don't know, Copala no, I got
Speaker 1: that one wrong, and Yoka Peel and uh. So his
Speaker 1: friends had been working on similar ideas for other implementations,
Speaker 1: and at the end of August, n r C was
Speaker 1: switched on and it lived on a single computer, so
Speaker 1: just one computer in the world running the server software
Speaker 1: for i r C. So then you had this group
Speaker 1: of friends campaigned the university to eventually allow them to
Speaker 1: release this code to a wider audience because technically the
Speaker 1: code belonged to the university itself. And I love the
Speaker 1: way that the that Yarko talks about the the development.
Speaker 1: He says, once it got up to ten users, I
Speaker 1: knew that I wanted to let other people have a
Speaker 1: crack at this, and I thought ten on the Internet
Speaker 1: was very I mean, it wasn't really the Internet yet.
Speaker 1: The Internet was a yeah, the Internet was was just
Speaker 1: the realm of research organizations and universities. No one outside
Speaker 1: of that really had much access to it. Besides it
Speaker 1: was some government agencies as well, but you know, we
Speaker 1: plebians out in the real world didn't have any access
Speaker 1: to it. The Worldwide Web was more than a decade away,
Speaker 1: so this was you know, this was early early days,
Speaker 1: so ten was actually a significant number. Just I just
Speaker 1: joke about it because I think of our discussion about
Speaker 1: Twitter from a few weeks ago about how the five
Speaker 1: thousand number was so small. But yeah, ten people. So
Speaker 1: he just he convinces the university to allow them to
Speaker 1: release this code to some other people, and they started
Speaker 1: getting it installed in other universities in Finland first and
Speaker 1: they joined on and then looked at other countries as well.
Speaker 1: But there were some issues there right there, there were
Speaker 1: a few like inter country connectivity issues apparently. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean at this point, again, internet is not
Speaker 1: a real thing, right right, Yeah yeah. Yrkill remembers there
Speaker 1: being specific problems connecting his his networks in Finland with
Speaker 1: US networks, but this wouldn't go on for very long. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were improvements in the infrastructure going on at the
Speaker 1: same time as I r C starting to catch on
Speaker 1: in popularity. In fact, by November of that year, of
Speaker 1: universities in Colorado and Oregon would become connected to the
Speaker 1: I r C network. Um they would set up their
Speaker 1: own servers and and hook everything up together, so it
Speaker 1: was no longer solely finished and what it was just
Speaker 1: getting started. I couldn't help myself. UM and uh Jorco
Speaker 1: had connected with some people through m I T S
Speaker 1: network and distributed a couple of copies and it basically
Speaker 1: just went wild. I mean like he did. He didn't
Speaker 1: distribute it physically to all of these people that ended
Speaker 1: up setting up their their their own versions. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's actually kind of funny, like the story about the
Speaker 1: Colorado coming online. As I understand it, one of the
Speaker 1: other UH universities in Finland there was a user who
Speaker 1: was very interested in it, who then passed it on
Speaker 1: to someone who was at in Colorado, who then uh,
Speaker 1: you know, so it was it was growing organically. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like a planned out this is how we're rolling
Speaker 1: this out. It was it was a viral. Yeah. He
Speaker 1: was just like, hey, check out the school thing that
Speaker 1: I made, and and all of a sudden he would
Speaker 1: see it pop up in other places. So that was
Speaker 1: August to November. It took very little time at all.
Speaker 1: By mid there were forty servers worldwide. Uh, and by
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety the average number of active servers so forty
Speaker 1: servers worldwide that not all of them are necessarily active
Speaker 1: all the time. So by the number of active servers
Speaker 1: and the number of active users at any particular given
Speaker 1: time was still pretty modest. We're talking twelve users and
Speaker 1: thirty eight servers. Granted, the original code for I r
Speaker 1: C really only accounted for some hundred users to be
Speaker 1: connected all at the same time. And uh. Furthermore, according
Speaker 1: to some numbers around that same time, there were only
Speaker 1: three million people worldwide who even had access to the Internet.
Speaker 1: So right and and doing something like if you've ever
Speaker 1: connected to a BBS in the old days. A lot
Speaker 1: of those original bbs has only had capacity for a
Speaker 1: couple of people to connect at a time. So for
Speaker 1: something to have the capacity to allow a hundred people
Speaker 1: to communicate simultaneously was a huge deal. It was it
Speaker 1: would turn out to not be scalable really all, which
Speaker 1: created many problems down the line. Yes. In fact, so
Speaker 1: in August, that's when one of these problems starts to
Speaker 1: rear its head, and that the I r C community
Speaker 1: suffers its first schism, but not the last one. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: we'll chat some more about I r C in just
Speaker 1: a moment, but first let's take a quick break. So
Speaker 1: in this corner you have the traditional I C community,
Speaker 1: and on the other corner you had a group that
Speaker 1: just they you know, they didn't want people to tell
Speaker 1: him what to do. They wanted they wanted freedom from
Speaker 1: rules rules of four squares. Man, I don't know if
Speaker 1: they actually used that voices, that's exactly how people talk
Speaker 1: to I'm old enough to remember, I see. So So
Speaker 1: these two groups split and the kind of anarchists, the
Speaker 1: anarchists sort of side founded a net which stood in
Speaker 1: fact for anarchist net. Yes, and the rest of it
Speaker 1: became known as e f net, which stands for Aris
Speaker 1: Free Network e r I s Aris Free network and
Speaker 1: why because the server that a net was founded on
Speaker 1: was named Aris dot Berkeley dot e d U. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, you had one group of people who
Speaker 1: are like, we kind of want the freedom to do
Speaker 1: whatever we like, because we don't like these rules where
Speaker 1: you say we can't do things like take over someone's
Speaker 1: channel just because they weren't smart enough to block us
Speaker 1: from and since they're not smart enough, they should not
Speaker 1: be allowed to run that channel. I should be allowed
Speaker 1: to run it and do whatever I want. I'm being
Speaker 1: I'm certainly adding a little more motivation here than there
Speaker 1: was probably in the literature. But that's kind of how
Speaker 1: I do things. Well, I mean, you are you are
Speaker 1: being snarky, But first of all, snark is what you do.
Speaker 1: Snark is what both of us do. Snark is what
Speaker 1: tech stuff does. We embrace it. We do. Um, but uh,
Speaker 1: the folks who are on that that a net did
Speaker 1: really enjoy exploiting um what was called nick colliding and
Speaker 1: this is um. Yeah, so here's the thing, Like you
Speaker 1: would choose a nickname when you log into a channel
Speaker 1: or or a server to to chat with other people,
Speaker 1: and this nickname represents who you are. You can choose
Speaker 1: any nickname you want given the character limit of that
Speaker 1: that's supported by that particular client and server. So one
Speaker 1: thing that could happen is that if you try to
Speaker 1: choose what you know, another person's nickname, the system would
Speaker 1: generally prevent you from doing that, saying that that name
Speaker 1: is already taken. But if you were able to orchestrate
Speaker 1: an event or take advantage of an event where everyone
Speaker 1: is kicked out of a room and then you rejoin
Speaker 1: that room or channel, I should say, everyone's kicked out
Speaker 1: of a channel, you rejoined that channel before the operator
Speaker 1: or OP can join that channel, and you name yourself
Speaker 1: the OPS name. You could end up giving yourself OP
Speaker 1: powers for that channel, and you prevent the rightful OP
Speaker 1: from being able to take hold. And so that's nick colliding.
Speaker 1: It's when these nicknames collide. In One way that that
Speaker 1: would happen is you would have what what's called a
Speaker 1: net split. A net split is when uh you have
Speaker 1: two servers that are connected to a network that are
Speaker 1: running the same sort of channel, and some people are
Speaker 1: on one server, some people are on the other server,
Speaker 1: but they're all in the same chat room. But then
Speaker 1: somehow a connection between those servers breaks and then you
Speaker 1: end up having two instances of that same channel. So
Speaker 1: you've got half the people in one and half the
Speaker 1: people in the other. So let's say that I'm a jerk.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's easy to say, right, So I'm a jerk.
Speaker 1: I've lugged into the mansion. I'm hold on, it's gonna
Speaker 1: take me a second. Yeah, I know, it's okay. There's
Speaker 1: you're in the forest. There's a tree, all right. So Lauren,
Speaker 1: you're an OP and I'm a and I've logged into
Speaker 1: the channel and right now I'm not being too jerky,
Speaker 1: so you haven't booted me or anything like that. But
Speaker 1: there's a net split, and you and your group are
Speaker 1: in one server. I'm on another server, so we're on
Speaker 1: separate ones. I say, uh, there's been a net split.
Speaker 1: I shall change my name, yes, exactly, I'll change my
Speaker 1: name to Lauren's name. And so I changed my nickname.
Speaker 1: And then when the servers are reunited and it tries
Speaker 1: to reconcile these two worlds into one because you have
Speaker 1: two people with the same nickname, the nicknames collide, thus
Speaker 1: Nick colliding, and it boots both people out of the channel. Now,
Speaker 1: because I'm a jerk, and because I've planned for this,
Speaker 1: I've already got another window open, so i can log
Speaker 1: right back in using Lauren's nickname again. And Lauren, because
Speaker 1: she wasn't expecting this because she was being decent, is
Speaker 1: locked out of her own channel. That's kind of nick
Speaker 1: colliding in a you know, in a nutshell, and that's
Speaker 1: the sort of stuff these guys like to do. So
Speaker 1: they started up their own party. They say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the e f net people for some reason don't find
Speaker 1: this nearly as entertaining as we do, so we're gonna
Speaker 1: make our own party. However, a net would not last
Speaker 1: very long, and in fact, most users chose to go
Speaker 1: with e f net instead, saying this anarchy thing doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like it's a lot of fun or very you know,
Speaker 1: a productive does Everyone being nice seems to make a
Speaker 1: lot more sense, right, So then we have a unified
Speaker 1: network e f net again. So it started off as
Speaker 1: a unified network, had that one schism, A net did
Speaker 1: not last very long. We're back to unified. However, then
Speaker 1: you have a second splintering, which is when some users
Speaker 1: left e f net to form tub net, which was
Speaker 1: mostly kind of a The tub net folks were saying, look,
Speaker 1: you need to fix things so that net splits happen
Speaker 1: less frequently. They are, they're disruptive, you, it's it's ruining
Speaker 1: the experience, right. The way that people react to net
Speaker 1: splits is not the problem. The fact that year having
Speaker 1: net splits at all is something that really needs to
Speaker 1: be worked on more exactly. And so it wasn't so
Speaker 1: much a disagreement with policy as it was we need
Speaker 1: to improve this platform. So they left and uh tough
Speaker 1: net had about five servers and around a hundred users,
Speaker 1: but it didn't stay around very long either. People kind
Speaker 1: of might kind of reabsorbed. Yeah, um and and again,
Speaker 1: basically all of these were really scalability issues, um, which
Speaker 1: which Jerko himself actually listed as being just about the
Speaker 1: only thing that he would go back and change if
Speaker 1: he had it to all do over again. Right. But
Speaker 1: you know, again, hindsight being twenty, it was a lot
Speaker 1: harder to imagine this back when you were doing something
Speaker 1: where you had ten people on absolutely so an event,
Speaker 1: a world event happens that ends up making i r
Speaker 1: C a very useful utility for a certain population. That
Speaker 1: was when the Gulf War broke out and you started
Speaker 1: seeing lots of people using i r C to communicate
Speaker 1: about the war, sharing news stories, sharing information as they
Speaker 1: got it because different parts of the world we're getting
Speaker 1: reports earlier than other parts, and everyone wanted to know
Speaker 1: what was going on. And this was when they were
Speaker 1: seeing the height of their popularity in their early days.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind, again we're talking modest numbers. So
Speaker 1: when we tell you how many users at the higher
Speaker 1: their popularity, don't snicker, right, because for the first time
Speaker 1: in history, it was it was about three concurrent users
Speaker 1: at any given moment, and that that was a big deal. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of similar to how we were saying
Speaker 1: in the Twitter episode about how how people were so
Speaker 1: impressed by the ability that this that this software gave
Speaker 1: them to tune into live reporting about an issue, same
Speaker 1: same thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly, So it was you know, really,
Speaker 1: to me, what this says is it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: premonition about what the Internet will be and how it
Speaker 1: will be important and how people will use it to
Speaker 1: communicate these important ideas in real time. Across the entire globe,
Speaker 1: and even though it was very tiny, particularly compared to
Speaker 1: something as enormous as the Internet, it was kind of
Speaker 1: a proof of concept in many ways. So then another
Speaker 1: split happens, but this one was not It was an
Speaker 1: amicable split. It wasn't something where a bunch of people
Speaker 1: were really upset. A user who used the nickname wild
Speaker 1: Thang and yes that is how it's spelled, created a
Speaker 1: test network to develop bots. So these are automated accounts.
Speaker 1: Often they will create admins that are bots, and the
Speaker 1: admin bots really are just there to scan for anything
Speaker 1: that would be objectionable and react to it so that
Speaker 1: if someone's typing in all caps, the bot can step
Speaker 1: in and say, please, don't type in all caps. People
Speaker 1: were much more sensitive about that in these early days
Speaker 1: of Internet. Yeah, you know, because it was considered shouting.
Speaker 1: And no, no, I mean it's still considered shouting. But
Speaker 1: it's kind of funny these days. I think back back then,
Speaker 1: if you're if your handle is drunk hulk, it's hilarious.
Speaker 1: Well but at any rate times yes, okay, that's fair.
Speaker 1: It's not not always hilarious, but frequently so the this
Speaker 1: this approach, this Uh, this split to create this area
Speaker 1: where they could test out bots. It was really just
Speaker 1: men as a testing ground, but more and more people
Speaker 1: wanted to join it to kind of play around with
Speaker 1: things and test things out and see what else was possible.
Speaker 1: And that is how the undernet was born. And uh,
Speaker 1: it actually had some really useful goals. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: about playing with bots and seeing what you could program
Speaker 1: to to do. It also involved ways of registering channels
Speaker 1: to users so that nick colliding was less of a problem.
Speaker 1: The idea being that if you register the channel to
Speaker 1: a user and you had some form of verification like
Speaker 1: a password, that would really cut down on people being
Speaker 1: able to take over a channel without authorization. So it
Speaker 1: actually exists in parallel with the f net. It's not
Speaker 1: trying to compete or anything. It's just it's just kind
Speaker 1: of a like almost like a sandbox where people can
Speaker 1: test out things. And uh, that's where I r C
Speaker 1: really stopped being a united network and becomes a platform
Speaker 1: that runs on different networks. This is the first time
Speaker 1: we start seeing something that can survive on its own
Speaker 1: and doesn't. It's not just a flash in the pan,
Speaker 1: you know. Splinter group, So by May, the i r
Speaker 1: C protocol is made available to the general public. It's
Speaker 1: no longer just something that's being spread from uh, you know,
Speaker 1: one one enthusiast to another. Now it's available for anyone.
Speaker 1: And the summer of nineteen Uh, we get a fork
Speaker 1: in under net. So we've talked about splintering with e
Speaker 1: f net. Now undernet itself forks and another group called
Speaker 1: down net d a l n et is born and
Speaker 1: it was really trying to bring more stability and security
Speaker 1: to the i r C platform exactly. And a lot
Speaker 1: of their their improvements were made by a guy named
Speaker 1: Brian morpher Smith. So again looking to improve the platform. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think these splits are looked upon with much more
Speaker 1: fondness by people. You know, everyone was trying to make
Speaker 1: it better as opposed to having having like deep philosophical
Speaker 1: disagreements within the community. Uh. And then in undernet would
Speaker 1: split again, but this time it was it was one
Speaker 1: of those UM system problems, infrastructure problems. Uh. You see,
Speaker 1: there was a server in Australia that was part of
Speaker 1: the undernet, but connecting from Australia to the rest of
Speaker 1: the world there was a lot of lag, so huge
Speaker 1: delays you would type something in, you'd hit enter, it
Speaker 1: would take you know, several seconds for it to to
Speaker 1: transfer over. By then whatever, the topic of conversation has
Speaker 1: changed dramatically. Everyone thinks that you're being either obtuse or
Speaker 1: just really slow. But it turns us just because there's lag.
Speaker 1: So there was a conscious decision to split from the
Speaker 1: undernet UH and to create a new Australian based network
Speaker 1: called oz org. So so this was again another one
Speaker 1: of those beneficial splits that that was really done for
Speaker 1: the good of the community rather than due to UH
Speaker 1: inter community arguments. Exactly. Yeah, it's really I mean it was.
Speaker 1: It was sad in a way because it meant that
Speaker 1: the Australians became kind of you know, insulated from everybody
Speaker 1: else and everyone else was denied the pleasure of Australian company.
Speaker 1: But it was due specifically to technological you know, shortcomings
Speaker 1: that had nothing to do with philosophical disagreements. Our next
Speaker 1: item on the list, however, is very much one of
Speaker 1: those angry philosophical disagreements. Yes, this is what is called
Speaker 1: the Great Split, which you know, I've had a few
Speaker 1: of those in bowling and they are really a pain.
Speaker 1: But this happened in July of nine six. I r
Speaker 1: c net splits off from e f net and uh
Speaker 1: I are s net and e f net are are
Speaker 1: still kind of like these odds. Yeah, there's so it
Speaker 1: was over generally, it was over a disagreement on how
Speaker 1: to handle operational issue, right. It was basically a culmination
Speaker 1: of all of those old arguments over how NICK collisions
Speaker 1: should be handled and over exactly how much power ops
Speaker 1: and admins should have in their in their channels. It
Speaker 1: was really to try and define these roles in different
Speaker 1: ways because as it turns out, we'll talk about a
Speaker 1: little bit a little bit later about how the definitions
Speaker 1: of operators versus admins it's a little money depending upon
Speaker 1: which service you're using, um. And also the capabilities that
Speaker 1: ops and admins have are different depending upon you know,
Speaker 1: the actual servers and clients that are being used. So
Speaker 1: there were some disagreements and we ended up having the
Speaker 1: split I r C net actually more out of coincidence
Speaker 1: than planning. It wound up being I mean, I mean
Speaker 1: cultural and geographical and and both of those. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are a few servers that the jump ship one
Speaker 1: way or another, but yeah, most of the ones in
Speaker 1: I r C net are in Europe and Australia and Japan,
Speaker 1: and most of the e F net ones are in
Speaker 1: the US. So it ended up kind of just being
Speaker 1: on that dividing line. It wasn't it wasn't like US
Speaker 1: versus everybody else. It just kind of that's just kind
Speaker 1: of how it shook out. And since then, multiple networks
Speaker 1: have appeared running on I r C. So you had
Speaker 1: this unified network, although it's very very tiny comparatively speaking. Uh,
Speaker 1: and now that you have a bunch of separate networks.
Speaker 1: At its height of popularity, which was a long time
Speaker 1: ago in two thousand three, I r C had one
Speaker 1: million users. As of January, that had dropped to about
Speaker 1: four thousand, but it's still not terribly shabby and it's
Speaker 1: still used quite a bit by a lot of I mean,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of communities I go to where
Speaker 1: I r C chat rooms are incorporated into the experience,
Speaker 1: like like sites that do streaming video where they'll do
Speaker 1: some forum a broadcast if they don't have a native
Speaker 1: chat client that's part of that service. I r C
Speaker 1: is the way that almost all of them go, and
Speaker 1: that includes big names, like big companies all the way
Speaker 1: to down too little independent operators because it's an open
Speaker 1: source approach. We've got a little bit more to say
Speaker 1: about i r C, but before we get to that,
Speaker 1: let's take another quake break. Okay, so we're back, and
Speaker 1: now i'd kind of like to talk about the hierarchy
Speaker 1: of things that you know, like the people who are
Speaker 1: on I r C, because before the break we mentioned
Speaker 1: that there's a little bit of confusion in the ranks
Speaker 1: of what an OP versus an ADMIN is and how
Speaker 1: much control they have over what's going on. Right, So,
Speaker 1: for one thing, operator is used by some services for
Speaker 1: two different things. An operator might be a person who
Speaker 1: has complete control of the server which has all the
Speaker 1: stuff running on it, or just complete control over the
Speaker 1: channel like a specific UH chat room exactly, so you
Speaker 1: could have multiple channels on a single erver UH. And
Speaker 1: then the operator is the person who could either be
Speaker 1: in charge of everything or in charge of justice specific channel.
Speaker 1: Another frequent term is admin that tends to be someone
Speaker 1: who's in charge of a channel. So these are people
Speaker 1: who have extra commands at their disposal beyond the ones
Speaker 1: that any user has, and these commands allow you to
Speaker 1: do lots of different things that make it useful, uh,
Speaker 1: in order to have things run smoothly on your channel. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, you can mute people, which is often useful
Speaker 1: if someone is being particularly probably yeah, and you don't
Speaker 1: want to just boot them and ban them, maybe you
Speaker 1: mute them so that they don't even know that, Like,
Speaker 1: they don't know that their stuff is not showing up,
Speaker 1: so they're still typing wildly, but none of it's coming through, right,
Speaker 1: so everyone else is blissfully ignorant. I mean sometimes that's
Speaker 1: easier because you know, booting booting someone, which is another
Speaker 1: thing they can do. They can kick people out of
Speaker 1: a room, which generally speaking, booting does not disconnect you
Speaker 1: from I r C, but it will disconnect you from
Speaker 1: that channel. You often will then have either a ban
Speaker 1: on the channel so you can't go back into it,
Speaker 1: or um, you know, you can go back in, but
Speaker 1: then the OP will give you a stern warning and
Speaker 1: say if you do this, I will ban you from
Speaker 1: the server, which means you don't you know, you don't
Speaker 1: just get banned from the channel but the server itself. Uh. Now, granted,
Speaker 1: there are ways around that if you're particularly trollish and
Speaker 1: you want to take extra effort to really be a
Speaker 1: pain in the patucas, but you know that's what the
Speaker 1: mute buttons for. Also, you can do moderated discussions. So
Speaker 1: a moderated discussion is where you have an admin who
Speaker 1: picks who gets to talk. When this is really useful
Speaker 1: if you wanted to do something like a question answer
Speaker 1: session and you have someone who is addressing a group
Speaker 1: of people and then wants to take in questions, but
Speaker 1: you can't just be flooded by them, uh, and admin
Speaker 1: may take on the role of moderator who then picks
Speaker 1: the person who will ask the question in text and
Speaker 1: in the person you know whoever's answering will then address that.
Speaker 1: So that's also very useful. And there are other ends
Speaker 1: as well. There's some UM confusion about what operators exactly
Speaker 1: can cannot do. There are people who essentially ascribe them
Speaker 1: godlike powers and they could do anything they wanted, and
Speaker 1: that's not entirely true. There's some great UM resources on
Speaker 1: i RC dot org if you want to go there
Speaker 1: and check it out. There there's frequently ask question guides
Speaker 1: that will answer everything, including one about what exactly cannon
Speaker 1: op and can't and OP do to try and demystified
Speaker 1: a little bit. It's an entertaining read, so I would
Speaker 1: recommend it. So let's talk a little bit about them.
Speaker 1: What's actually under the hood, How is this actually working?
Speaker 1: This is where we get into the tech of the
Speaker 1: tech stuff. And yeah, so it's open protocol. We mentioned
Speaker 1: it earlier, and it relies on TCP. That's transmission controlled protocol, right,
Speaker 1: And that's one of the two biggies that were created
Speaker 1: by the Power Team events SURF and bob Con, the
Speaker 1: other being i P, Y T c P, I P
Speaker 1: are the big ones. You know, you probably have heard
Speaker 1: them before. These are essentially the rules that create the
Speaker 1: the traffic guidelines for data across networks. Well, without these rules,
Speaker 1: computers wouldn't have a standardized approach to sending and receiving data,
Speaker 1: and you wouldn't be able to have this incredible packet
Speaker 1: switching network out there where you can send stuff across
Speaker 1: the network and not worry if a computer or ten
Speaker 1: computers or a hundred computers go down in the process
Speaker 1: as long as whichever computer is the destination is still
Speaker 1: active because it can reroute, so right, right, Although this
Speaker 1: does mean that it's not technically part of the Worldwide
Speaker 1: Web exactly. Of course, there are web based clients that
Speaker 1: let you log into I r C. Right, yeah, you
Speaker 1: want you don't necessarily these days need to download an
Speaker 1: I r C client to your computer and then run
Speaker 1: that as a separate program. Uh, for particular websites. Not
Speaker 1: obviously you're not necessarily going to be able to visit
Speaker 1: any channel anywhere. But you know, I was meant the
Speaker 1: idea of that moderated discussion. Uh, So if you're going
Speaker 1: to say a streaming site, I'll use a real example. So, um,
Speaker 1: there's uh, there's a web podcast publication company called the
Speaker 1: frog Pants Network run by a guy named Scott Johnson.
Speaker 1: He does a lot of really funny podcasts. He streams
Speaker 1: his podcasts live, he records somebody streams them live, and
Speaker 1: he invites people to come into this chat room and
Speaker 1: participate in a discussion. So, uh, that would allow you.
Speaker 1: You go to the website where the the video is streaming,
Speaker 1: and just underneath it is this little web based I
Speaker 1: r C client and all you do is type in
Speaker 1: whatever nickname you want to use and hit enter, and
Speaker 1: then away you go, and you can make as many
Speaker 1: goofy jokes as you like, which Scott uh encourages that's
Speaker 1: the kind of world he lives, and I appreciate it
Speaker 1: so anyway that that's an example. But yes, it's it
Speaker 1: itself is not part of the world Wide Web. It
Speaker 1: predates the World Wide Web, so that's important to him. Member,
Speaker 1: And you know, I know that most people these days
Speaker 1: have a grasp on that. I just remember a time
Speaker 1: when Worldwide Web and Internet were synonymous to most people,
Speaker 1: Like you know, if they thought of the Internet, they
Speaker 1: were thinking Worldwide Web. They weren't They didn't realize that email, FTP,
Speaker 1: all these other protocols are also part of it, right
Speaker 1: right then they existed in layers, yes, exactly. So to
Speaker 1: log in, like we said, you'd launch that client an appy,
Speaker 1: and you would direct it to the appropriate server because
Speaker 1: there are different ones. Like you, if you've got an app,
Speaker 1: that's just all it is is just running this program.
Speaker 1: It needs to know where you're where to point it,
Speaker 1: like you have to tell it there are many different
Speaker 1: servers that I might have access to. And then once
Speaker 1: you got to that server, then you would have to
Speaker 1: try and you know, find the right channel. You might
Speaker 1: look through a list of channels and designate the specific
Speaker 1: one you want to join. You could join multiple channels
Speaker 1: and then switch between them so that you're part of
Speaker 1: multiple conversations all at the same time. And some servers,
Speaker 1: depending on which one you have logged into, UM might
Speaker 1: ask you to create a user name and even a password. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so instead of just coming in under a nickname, because
Speaker 1: some of them will just assign you a random string
Speaker 1: like a nine digit number. Right, I feel like like
Speaker 1: you are web visitors eight seven b Q four. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a great catchy name. But you can also designate
Speaker 1: your your nickname or user name, and like like Lauren said,
Speaker 1: some of them will also allow you to create a
Speaker 1: password which will protect your nickname so that no one
Speaker 1: else can have it. From that. From that, right that
Speaker 1: nick duplication thing, which usually only works on some of
Speaker 1: them are server wide, but a lot of them are
Speaker 1: just channel specific. So in other words, there could be
Speaker 1: someone in another channel posing as you and being a
Speaker 1: total jerk. Uh. That's my excuse for having multiple personalities
Speaker 1: on an I r C server where one of me
Speaker 1: is really friendly and one of me is not. I'm complex.
Speaker 1: So since it's a client server architecture and it's not
Speaker 1: on this distributed network, that's where you are able to,
Speaker 1: you know, access lots of different stuff, but only the
Speaker 1: stuff that's available on that server. Like we were saying earlier,
Speaker 1: if there are channels that you want to visit, but
Speaker 1: that server doesn't host those channels, you're out of luck.
Speaker 1: I mean, you create a channel maybe if you have
Speaker 1: the permissions to do that, but you might not be
Speaker 1: in with all of your buddies, similar to like like
Speaker 1: World Warcraft or something like that. You have to all
Speaker 1: join up in the same right to play the same game, right,
Speaker 1: because those servers have a limitation on how much they
Speaker 1: can support and once you reach that, that's it. So
Speaker 1: uh yeah, it's you know, that's also where the the
Speaker 1: net split thing comes into play, because if you do
Speaker 1: have multiple servers connected together that are running the same
Speaker 1: channel and they split, that's where you get that problem
Speaker 1: is talking about earlier, where the actual audience splits up
Speaker 1: and you end up with talking to just a fraction
Speaker 1: of the room. Right, Although the servers can be connected together, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can connect a lot of them together. That's where
Speaker 1: you know, that was the whole idea behind the original
Speaker 1: I r C network. It's just it's funny because if
Speaker 1: you look at I r C today, you wouldn't think
Speaker 1: of it as starting as a unified network because there's
Speaker 1: so many different servers and networks out there. So today
Speaker 1: it just looks like it was something that grew into
Speaker 1: like it started out as islands all growing separately, but
Speaker 1: in fact it was one land mass that later broke
Speaker 1: into separate islands. But but yeah, but you can you
Speaker 1: can connect those islands back to one another retroactively these
Speaker 1: days if you want to. If an OP wants to
Speaker 1: give his or her users access to a greater number
Speaker 1: of channels, sure, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, as
Speaker 1: long as you're all running the same I r C
Speaker 1: server software, you're you're good to go. Once in a while,
Speaker 1: like we said, you get those broken connections, that's a bummer.
Speaker 1: And also lag is an issue. Um, there are times
Speaker 1: where lag will be a particular problem and you find
Speaker 1: it frustrating to communicate. There's an actual command slash ping
Speaker 1: that will tell you how long the delay is between
Speaker 1: when you type something in and when it respond When
Speaker 1: how long it takes a message to go from the
Speaker 1: server and from the server back to you. You can
Speaker 1: also ping other users to find out how long it
Speaker 1: takes for a message to go from you to that
Speaker 1: person and from the person back to you. So that way,
Speaker 1: if you're doing these little private messages off to the side,
Speaker 1: you know, if someone's not responding to you and maybe
Speaker 1: because they just they're they're lagging, Yeah, you can understand
Speaker 1: whether you have in fact lost connection or if there's
Speaker 1: a leg or or if they're just ignoring you. Yes,
Speaker 1: like if you get the instead of a lag message,
Speaker 1: it just says I'm washing my hair. Just take the
Speaker 1: hint because I don't have hair. Guys, I tell you
Speaker 1: I'm washing my hair, it just means I don't want
Speaker 1: to talk anyway. So if you listen to that episode
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier, we go into a lot more
Speaker 1: detail about the different commands that are available to your
Speaker 1: basic user and explained that why you know, the ones
Speaker 1: that you might find on one version, like the undernet,
Speaker 1: are different than e F net, that are different than
Speaker 1: I r C Net, because like we said, these all
Speaker 1: evolved separately once they split off from each other, and
Speaker 1: you know, it's been all several decades since they were
Speaker 1: for introduced. Yeah, yeah, I find that I find it
Speaker 1: really interesting that it all of this time has passed,
Speaker 1: and that it is still in use, perhaps not widely
Speaker 1: in use now that there are many other options that
Speaker 1: are pretty widely populated. But Jarko himself once once said
Speaker 1: in a talk with the Undernet Public Relations Committee, Um,
Speaker 1: what makes I r C special is a sense of anonymity.
Speaker 1: The only things that you often know of the other
Speaker 1: person are those that you can conclude from the discussions. Right, So,
Speaker 1: for example, you may conclude that they have a shared
Speaker 1: interest in a particular topic, assuming that they are being
Speaker 1: genuine when they joined that that channel, because you know trolls, sure,
Speaker 1: but but but other other than that, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's not like this is linked to your Facebook or
Speaker 1: your Twitter or other personally identifiable information. You don't even
Speaker 1: necessarily have to use a user name that you're going
Speaker 1: to put in use anywhere else on the Internet. Right,
Speaker 1: you might be able, you might feel more free to
Speaker 1: express thoughts that you otherwise would feel would be uh,
Speaker 1: you'd be judged upon, you know, not not even in
Speaker 1: a trollish way, I mean just being honest and upfront.
Speaker 1: And maybe maybe you're looking for friends who can support
Speaker 1: you in something that you don't really feel comfortable talking
Speaker 1: to the folks around you. I mean that happens, so
Speaker 1: it certainly has a valuable place. And like I said,
Speaker 1: I still use I r C. I mean, I still
Speaker 1: uh joined these conversations. There are shows that I have
Speaker 1: been a guest on that have used I r C
Speaker 1: chat rooms. I love having that available and seeing what
Speaker 1: the live audience is saying during the show. Usually there's
Speaker 1: a lag of about you know, ten seconds or so
Speaker 1: between what what we do on the video and when
Speaker 1: people see it and are able to respond to it.
Speaker 1: So but it's still I mean, if a good show
Speaker 1: that does this, they'll actually incorporate user responses and and
Speaker 1: they call people out and and and you know, give
Speaker 1: them credit or or you know, shame them publicly, depending
Speaker 1: upon the the appropriate response. But it's it's one of
Speaker 1: those things that enriches Internet experience. Absolutely. Yeah. I have
Speaker 1: very fond memories of it from um probably about two
Speaker 1: thousand four to two eight, I think is when I
Speaker 1: was using m I r C, which is the Microsoft
Speaker 1: client for it. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic
Speaker 1: episode of tech Stuff. If you have any suggestions for
Speaker 1: future topics I should cover, let me know the best
Speaker 1: way to do that. Is to hop over to Twitter
Speaker 1: and use the handled text stuff h s W I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
Speaker 1: I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.