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What is IRC? (part 2 - Private messages)
What we have considered at the moment is known as public chats, where everyone in the channel can see what everyone else is saying. Now this is fine but quite often you will want to say things to individuals that you don't want anyone else to see. This is were private messages are handy.
Lets go back to our house analogy (only one house at the moment, we'll get to the town soon). Although this isn't exactly the most realistic thing that you'll see, i think it's the easiest way to explain it. Each person in the house is called a different name and so is unique - this means they can be easily identified. To contact that person privately you can send them a letter and (normally) they are the only person to read it. You can send letters to anyone in the house, doesn't matter which room they are in, and it will get to them.
This also works on IRC (single IRC server for the moment). You can send a private message to anyone on the server. The name of the people are referred to as their nickname, or nick for short. Nicknames are usually not the person's real name but may reflect their interests or personality, or may be something that doesn't mean anything but is just a nice nickname (or not so nice).
When we consider the town things get a little more complicated, and it depends if the houses are linked or not. For unlinked houses, if you send a message to someone in house 2 from house 1 it will not work, the letter won't be able to get there since the first house doesn't have a record of who is in the second house and therefore has no way of passing the letter on. (Again, that's wrong in real life, but lets' pretend it's true). However, if the houses are linked as was seen in the last page the letter will be able to get through - the two houses can communicate and the letter gets sent to where it's supposed to go. It doesn't matter what room(s) the person
On IRC networks anyone can send messages to anyone else on the server (providing they know the nick of the person they want to send the message to). But you cannot send messages between servers unless they are on a network.
What I've said so far has implied that once you are connected to an IRC server then you will automatically be on a channel but this isn't quite true. You can connect to a server without joining a channel but you can still use private messages to talk to people. You could compare this to being in the garden of the house, you're still in the grounds of the houses but not in any room.
Another thing i've implied which isn't true - you can be in more than one channel at the same time. Obviously this would be pretty impressive if you could do it in the analogy, but on IRC you can. The number of channels you can join is dictated by the Server that you're on.
A third thing i've implied which isn't true - the channels are not set, you can create new channels by just joining one which doesn't already exist (sounds silly but is true) and channels will usually vanish when the last person leaves (ie there are zero people in the channel)
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