IRC: The Unofficial History
IRC stands for "In Real Chat", but we know it's not.
In the early 80s, some bored programmer dude created a chat system that would allow users to communicate with each other over the internet using a command-line interface.
It was the 90s, and the internet was still a thing, sort of.
Users connected via telnet, and the chat was as slow as molasses in the winter.
But we loved it. Oh, we loved it so much.