IRC (An acronym meaning Internet Relay Chat) is one of the oldest and largest chat areas on the Net. There are over 150 Different Chat Networks, each containing many, many chat channels. The bigger (and oldest) chat networks contain over 23,000 channels.

To chat on IRC, you must first have some chat software. This can be gotten from many sources. Some of the more popular ones are mIRC, X-chat and Pirch98 among others. Most of these have some very customizable abilities, especially in the way of aliases and scripting