Bruce R. Gilson's IRC Page, still under construction.

This is a short page that will be expanded in the future.

One of the great pleasures of my life these days is chatting with friends that I've made all over the world via Internet Relay Chat, or IRC for short . While there are a lot of programs people use to chat on IRC, the one I use (and therefore the one I know best) is called ircII. The ircII program is generally used on shell accounts. Many people prefer to use Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) accounts, but I find a shell account, where I log in as a terminal to a remote site running Unix, preferable for at least these reasons:

  1. I can log in from any place where there is a computer with a modem and terminal program, or even a dumb terminal. There is no need to have mail, news, etc. clients on the computer.
  2. My Internet service provider gives me mail, news, IRC, etc. clients, and I can always use the same ones, not having to learn new ones on different machines.
  3. I've heard of people with PPP accounts who actually had hackers get into their machines. This cannot happen when I'm logged into a shell.
Some people claim that shell accounts are old-fashioned. But people who know how to make them work like them. (For a young person who still likes to use a shell account, click on this location .) As I said, one of the programs that comes with my shell account is ircII. This is a comprehensive program which can be scripted to do many things in a customized manner, and I have done so myself. If you try IRC and like it, and you want to be able to write scripts for yourself, you will want to see the list of all IRC commands and expressions that has been put up on the Web. It will also be helpful to look at the page on programming in ircII that has been put up.

There are a number of newsgroups that are related to IRC. Just to give you two:

Last modified by B. R. Gilson (brg@netcom.com) Dec. 2, 1997.
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