Week 3 - Internet Archaeology

Except IRC - my chosen topic due to the fact that I have actually used it couple of times over a decade ago - is still in use today. Indeed apparently still serving more than half a million users amongst the top 100 servers alone. Apologies for the lack of "proper" references in this post, every search led me to more websites, none of them journals. Plus I'm lazy. Also no one was really shouting out the peak number of users since the inception of IRC, though since it's still going I imagine it was quite a few. The date of "birth" for IRC was sometime in August 1988 according to it's creator, Jarkko Oikarinen and given it's position as one of, if not the earliest example of real-time communication replacing mailing lists and BBS posts. While the tech itself may not be quite the same, it is also essentially the genesis of "chat rooms" that are now often hosted within websites, rather than on specific channels dedicated for that purpose. Another lazy hyperlink to a document from 1993 co-authored by Oikarinen provides some perspective that I'm not going into here. Also some controversy about file sharing - go 'net.