IRC is a chat protocol that stands for Internet Relay Chat. IRC was created in 1988 and had been going strong ever since. It's network and channel based. You connect to a network that someone or an organization runs with IRC daemons and you join channels that the network hosts. You have your very own nickname that people can identify you by.

It was my freshman year in highschool. I had been on IRC for a couple of years before; but I never used it to it's fullest. I would just jump from channel to channel on my parent's old Packard Bell with Windows 98 looking for good conversation. I used mIRC. But that year was when I really got into IRC thanks to a couple friends.

I was invited to a channel on EFnet where they all hung out and chatted about cracking, hacking and various other computer related topics. I loved it, but over time the channel lost it's momentum and talk started to slow down.

Eventually I got disconnected from the channel and didn't come back for a number of reasons. But I was still in other channels on different networks across IRC. One was a vegan channel on Undernet which I still hangout in. There are arguments, recipes, pot heads, and talk about everything really.

At the beginning of 2009 we started a project called Voom. Now, I don't really know what the fuck Voom was aiming for, but we started an IRC channel on EFnet for it. We all wrote PHP code and tried to make various tools that followed Voom standards we had put in place. It failed; it failed big time. Meh.

After the fall of Voom a few of us moved to Freenode when I started a channel called #infoforcefeed. It's a great channel. We talk about all kinds of topics that range from politics to programming... from programming to hacking and cracking. We've talked about algorithms, science, space, and how much border control sucks. #infoforcefeed won't be going anywhere anytime soon. It's a small band of intelligent people, but it's got big conversation at times.

So don't hate on IRC because it will be here long after you and I are gone; filled with newbs, the elite, spammers and crackers.