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| | Internet Relay Chat (IRC) History - How Invented, Jarkko Oikarinen |
 | | Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is the most widely used Internet chat system, and as seems often to be the case with Internet technologies, was developed by a graduate student, this time from Europe, named Jarkko Oikarinen at the University of Oulu, Finland. |
 | | During the summer of 1988, Oikarinen was working at the university Department of Information Processing Science, where he administered the department's Sun Unix server "tolsun.oulu.fi", running on a public access bulletin board system called OuluBox. |
 | | Partly inspired by Jyrki Kuoppala's "rmsg" program, and partly by Bitnet Relay Chat, Oikarinen decided to improve the existing multi-user chat program on OuluBox called MultiUser Talk (MUT), written by Jukka Pihl, itself based on the basic talk program then available on Unix computers. |
| www.livinginternet.com /r/ri_irc.htm (454 words) |
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