Hey there, these are some of my notes about IRC in general, and the CLI client irssi. IRC Primer Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an open protocol that uses TCP and optionally TLS. IRC was born in August 1988, by Jarkko Oikarinen at the University of Oulu in Finland. Years later, in 1993, was standardised as RFC 1459. Assigned port 194/TCP by IANA, however in practice most use 6667/TCP, and nearby ports (6660-6669, 7000).