Introduction to IRC

Internet Relay Chat, or IRC for short, is relatively unknown to people nowadays. Yet it’s one of the oldest chat networks the Internet has ever known, dating back to the late 1980s. If you’re curious about where it came from, The Serial Port team has an excellent video covering IRC’s early history.

This guide gives you a quick, beginner‑friendly overview of how IRC works. It’s not a full tutorial, but it should give you a brief overview of how IRC is typically structured.

There are many IRC networks available, all being run independently of each other. We obviously are our own network here at Flying Monkey, though there are others such as AustNet is another prominent Australian host. Being an older protocol, these services tend to be very lightweight. It uses barely any bandwidth, and the software does not consume a lot of resources.

You connect to an IRC network via an IRC client. Common ones include HexChat or mIRC. We’re not included in their default network lists, but you can add our network easily using the server details we have provided.

Once connected, you can either join an existing channel, or create your own. Think of these channels like individual chat rooms Channel names always start with a # character, which is likely where services such as Discord picked this trend up from. These channels are frequently based around certain topics or online communities.

Here we have a channel called #FlyingMonkey and another called #RetroComputing, and you can always download a list of existing channels to see if there are any others. Or you can create your own! It works the same as joining any channel – just use a name that isn’t already taken

Whether you join an existing channel, or use your own, you can control your experience using the NickServ and ChanServ facilities available right here on the Flying Monkey network.