IRC is a TCP/IP server-client based network protocol for chatting at the application layer of the OSI Reference Model. That means that it is a high-level protocol which is already abstracted from the low-level technical details. So you can emulate an IRC-client by hand with a terminal such like Telnet. By default the the TCP-port 6667 is used for listening incomming connections.

IRC is the oldest well-known chat protocol and is currently still in use. So you can guess that it will do it's work well. It is a server-client based protocol. That means that you need a software, a so called IRC-client, which is connecting to an IRC-server. This server is linked to other IRC-server's in the most cases. A cloud of combined IRC-server's is called IRC-network. There are existing hundred of IRC-network's in the Internet with an user-count of thousand of people.

Features

The primary features of IRC

Infrastructure

How messages are transmitted in an IRC-network