|
What is IRC? (part 1)
If you read the first page and thought "What is he talking about?", don't worry, you'll find out quite soon.
Firstly, what is IRC...
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, a big mouthful for something that (putting it extremely simply) lets people chat over the internet. You may have used the web based chats before like yahoo chat but IRC is quite different.
People often find it hard to get the concept of how IRC works so here's a very simple analogy for it.
Imagine your house - it has separate rooms, which are each designed for particular purposes eg the Dining room for eating, Bedroom for sleeping and so on. When you are in these rooms you tend to (but often don't only) do those things.
IRC is similar, it is also split into separate rooms (called channels) which are based on different topics (but you will often find they deviate from their topics). For example channel macintosh is normally for discussion about Apple Mac related topics, channel linux is for linux related topics and so on. Along with the 'themed' channels there are also the general channels, where everything and anything is talked about, one of those is channel chatzone.
Channels are often referred to as #channelname, where channelname is the name of the channel. The hash symbol (#) before the name tells you that that is a channel. So channel chatzone would be referred to as #chatzone.
Now this is were it gets more complicated, because, using the analogy, there is more than one house. In fact there's a whole town, all with rooms in them. Of course, some of the rooms will duplicate, say the Living room in House number 1 and the Living Room in House number 2. Although they have the same name, the people in the Living Room in House number 2 can't hear what the people in the living room in house number 1 are saying (and vice versa).
On IRC, the different houses are the various IRC servers which exist and again the rooms are the channels on IRC. Eg people on #chatzone on server A can't see what people on #chatzone on server B are saying. Unfortunately this particular part falls on it's head when you consider IRC networks. Here's how networks differ from single servers.
Consider the town again with all the separate houses in it. Lets pretend there is a phone connection between two of them - the phones are in the Living room of House 1 and the Living Room of House 2. This means that the people in the Living Room of House 1 can now hear what the people in the Living Room of House 2 are saying (and vice versa). The two rooms can now be considered as one single room. Now if you add more phone lines to other houses then you'll have the equivalent of a big room, but all the people are spread out over lots of houses.
That is basically how an IRC network works. The different servers are connected together so people on the different servers can speak to each other. This means that the people on #chatzone on Server A can now see what the people on #chatzone on Server B are saying. However, this doesn't mean that people on #macintosh on server A can see what people on #chatzone on Server B are saying, it only works for channels of the same name.
Continue to the next page
|
|
