Having graced you with a few tips on setting your Amiga up for email, Darren Irvine strides briskly on into the only partially civilised world of IRC

Where to get IRC client software - Sad Usenet fact

Setting your Amiga up for IRC - Grapvine IRC package - Getting Started

In some ways, I don't think I should be telling you about IRC at all. It's one of those things that if you've never used it, there's no great gaping hole in your life. But when you first try it, you might just find that you become as addicted to it as any drug user to their recreational pharmaceutical of choice - becoming more and more entrenched in a downward spiral of longer and longer chatting sessions with more and more obscure Finnish people, ultimately leading to higher and higher phone bills, an increasingly hermit-like existence and the ostracism of your peers. OK, so maybe I've been exaggerating a bit - it's not quite as addictive as actual drugs.

What is it then?

Internet Relay Chat was originally written by Finnish programmer Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988 and the Finns are still all over the place on IRC. It's full of Americans too, but an increasing number of UK users are making their presence felt.

Jarkko originally invented IRC to be a replacement for the Unix "Talk" command, but it has developed into something much more useful than Talk ever was.

IRC is basically a real-time conferencing system, allowing Internet users all over the world to meet in discussion areas known as "channels", and hold a conversation amongst themselves as if they were all in the same room, rather than connected to diverse computer systems anywhere on the planet.

IRC uses a client-server model of operation, where individual users run "client" software on their computers, which communicates with an IRC "server" program running on a system anywhere on the net. The servers handle the routing of messages from one client to another.

Setting your Amiga up for IRC

There are three main routes that you can take to get IRC operating on your Amiga. The first is extremely simple, but not very good. The second rates somewhere between pretty tricky and completely impossible on the ease-of-implementation scale, and isn't very good either. The third option is fairly easy to set up and is truly excellent. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which one I have running on my system.

For the sake of completeness, I'll cover all three options, but, really, if you don't find yourself preferring option 3, I'd consider a few weeks at a health farm, or, preferably, an intensive personality-reorganisation program.

Option 1

The first option is to use telnet to connect to a publicly accessible IRC server - this is a machine that has client software running on it, as well as the actual IRC server. Using this method of accessing IRC is as simple as connecting to a suitable server; log in (usually as "IRC", so no surprise there then) and, basically, that's it. This is probably a good way to get started with IRC, since you can see whether or not you like it without having to set up any software on your machine. Also, you can use this method to IRC from non-TCP/IP systems, like CIX, CompuServe and Delphi. However, the user interface looks and feels extremely dated and, let's face it, if you wanted to use a system like this you'd have bought a PC.

Option 2

The next option to consider is a system called Irchat which runs as a client script on top of the GNUEmacs editor, available from Aminet. To get this system up and running, you'll need to spend a fair amount of time getting the Emacs system going first.

I really wouldn't bother if I were you, since this method of accessing IRC really isn't much better than the Telnet one and is several orders of magnitude more difficult to get working. Also, if you really wanted to use a system like this, you'd be running a Unix system.

Option 3

The only really sensible option for any self-respecting Amiga owner is to use a great IRC program called Grapevine. This is no dated Unix port, but an Amiga program with proper Amiga controls and the whole works. Installing is little more than extracting the archive and copying a supplied library to LIBS:. You also have to add an environment-variable definition to s:user-startup, but, hey, you can work an Editor, can't you?

Once you have installed Grapevine, you'll wonder how users of lesser systems manage to use IRC at all. Operating IRC using a GUI-based system like this is so much better than using a text-only system and is, of course, the reason why you have an Amiga rather than a PC or Unix box in the first place.

Getting started

After you have decided on option 3 from the above list, and chosen a publicly accessible server to use, the next thing you're going to want to do is some actual chatting. As I've mentioned, IRC is divided up into different areas called "channels".

Each channel-name consists of a hash "#" and a alphanumeric name, usually (but not always) giving some sort of clue to what sort of things are talked about in a particular channel.

Note that Grapevine automatically puts in the "#" for you when you click on the Join Channel button, but if you are using a text-based system you'll have to type "/JOIN" followed by the channel name, including the "#".


Grapevine users don't even have to remember actual IRC commands, because a toolbar does most of the things that you need

The basic principle of operation of IRC is that anything you type in the text window (that's the small one at the bottom - the larger one at the top is the "message" window) gets echoed to the channel and all other users connected to that channel get to read your words of wisdom. Similarly, you can read the messages typed in by everybody else in your channel.

As well as the actual chatting, IRC has a series of commands that you can use, each one preceded by a forward slash "/" - the example shown above "/JOIN" is one. To get a complete list of available commands, type "/HELP" or click on Grapevine's "Help" button.

To get help on a specific command type "/HELP {command name}". To get started, there are only two commands that you'll need in addition to "/JOIN". The first of these is "/LEAVE" which, fairly obviously, causes you to leave the channel you are on. The other command that will come in handy is "/NAMES", which returns a list of all the channels that are accessible from the server to which you have connected.

Note that this is an extremely long list and to cut it down a bit, you might want to specify the "-min" qualifier to restrict the list to channels with a certain number of users. For example:

/NAMES *.* -min 20
The above line will produce a list of all channels that have at least 20 users.

Once you've been chatting a while, you can start experimenting with some of the other commands, but the chatting is the main thing and you shouldn't worry too much if you don't quickly master every obscure IRC command available. Remember, that as with other areas of net usage, such as email and Usenet, netiquette is important - if you go around on IRC acting like an idiot and insulting people, you'll soon get flamed for it.