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IRC stands for "Internet Relay Chat". It's a protocol for real-time chat sessions. (Read more [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irc about IRC on Wikipedia].) It was invented before the World Wide Web, so it was adopted by early open source contributors and Web developers, and it has been used by those communities ever since. Like e-mailemail, no single company controls IRC. IRC servers are offered by many individuals and organizations. Users log in to a particular server to chat with other users on that server, using a client program designed for IRC; just as there are many programs for reading e-mailemail, there are many different IRC client programs. Chat discussions take place in "channels,", which have names starting with a '#' symbol.