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### 1.1 Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication.

Contrary to most Instant Messenger (IM) systems, users usually don’t connect to a central server. Instead, users connect to a random server in a network, and servers relay messages from one to the next.

Here’s a typical example:

When you connect to the Freenode network (`http://freenode.net/`), you point your IRC client at the server `irc.freenode.net`. That server will redirect your client to a random server on the network, such as `zelazny.freenode.net`.

Once you’re connected, you can send messages to all other users connected to the same network, and you can join all channels on the same network. You might join the `#emacs` and the `#rcirc` channels, for example. (Typically, channel names begin with a hash character.)

Once you have joined a channel, anything you type will be broadcast to all the other users on the same channel.

If you want to address someone specifically, for example as an answer to a question, it is customary to prefix the message with the nick followed by a colon, like this:

    deego: fsbot rules!

Since this is so common, you can use `TAB` to do nick completion.