IRC?

IRC: The best invention since the telephone group conversations. Highly additictive (until you see your phonebill) and fun, and almost completely harmless. It's the most social activity you can engage in in front of your monitor (except perhaps inviting a couple of friends around for drinks and snacks playing some old games or maybe having sex on your keyboard.. hmm... is that what Microsoft refers to as 'sticky keys' in Windows 95???). In short, IRC is a text-based free-for-all computer conference. You simply chat with other people all over the world (provided of course they have access to the Internet) with great ease (most of the time). You can chat on a channel with many people at once or just have a private conversation with somebody. You can try the Undernets Documentarion Committee for more information

What you need to get started:

First of all you need a computer and some kind of Internet access. Have you come this far you're on the right track! ;-)
Secondly you need a IRC client, a program that gets you connected to one of the many IRC servers around. Me, I use mIRC, by Khaled Mardam-Bey. It's only available for Windows 3.x or Windows 95/NT. On this platform you can also try Pirch, that some prefer, but I've only tried it once or twice. If you have a Mac (*makes the ward-off-evil-sign*) you can run Ircle, and if you have some flavour of UNIX you can get away with ircii, but if you run UNIX you probably know that already... ;-)

How to get connected properly

Well, since you're already up and running a WWW browser and it seems to work you need not configure your system any more, at least not on Windows systems or Mac. What you need to do is fill in some kind of user info in the application you will be using: A nickname under which you will be known to others on IRC, eg. Feinorgh (my nick) or MrBlue or CrazyGuy (some characters are not allowed (!"#¤%&/ etcetera) and spaces. Also, the number of characters your nick can contain might be limited, 11 is max on most nets), a 'real name' that identifies you to other users if they'd like to know who you are (but you can be anonymous if you want, just don't type your real name!), and you might need to fill in some identd information so that the server can identify you (or you will not be let in). Refer to the documentation of your IRC client for this. Then you should be able to get connected at least.

What you can do on IRC

Since IRC are used primarily as a communication tool its most fundamental function is to relay text information between servers and users. You can use this for a variety of purposes, but mostly (as of yet) for your own enjoyment. Now, the people you can expect to find on a particular net on a particular day are all sorts who have access to Internet. Also it depends on what time of day you come in and if it's a weekend or just an ordinary working day. There are a lot more men than women, although that is gradually beginning to change.

There are a number of channels on IRC in which a conversation about a particular subject is supposed to take place, for example #atheism or #linux (all channels are preceded by a # to indicate that they are... well... channels) and some channels are for users of a special nationality (#sverige or #usa). Almost everything is covered, but you can expect to see a lot of channels about sex and such, as it is a popular way of using the IRC. You can find whatever you might be interested in, or if such a channel does not exist you can create it yourself! Keep the netiquette in mind though. Don't harass anyone and don't be lame and stupid. You'll notice.